BLOG: Digital Financial Reporting
This is a blog for information relating to digital financial reporting. This blog is basically my "lab notebook" for experimenting and learning about XBRL-based digital financial reporting. This is my brain storming platform. This is where I think out loud (i.e. publicly) about digital financial reporting. This information is for innovators and early adopters who are ushering in a new era of accounting, reporting, auditing, and analysis in a digital environment.
Much of the information contained in this blog is synthasized, summarized, condensed, better organized and articulated in my book XBRL for Dummies and in the chapters of Intelligent XBRL-based Digital Financial Reporting. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me.
Entries from March 11, 2018 - March 17, 2018
LEI Improvements
I mentioned LEI (Legal Entity Identifiers) in a prior blog post. Seems like the LEI folks have made some very significant improvements in their offerings.
First, they created an ontology.
Second, they already had the ability to search for legal entities (not sure if this changed).
Third, they have provided a bunch of data formats. I counted 15 different data formats! (See the EXPORT button on the left hand side)
Fourth, this is a really nice HOW TO USE page.
Here is an example using Microsoft:
- Search: This is the search page results.
- Human readable: Click the FOURTH ITEM, Microsoft Corporation, and you get a human readable representation of information about that legal entity.
- Machine readable: Go to the EXPORT button and you can download information in machine readable form. Or, just put ".xml" on the end of the LEI, and you get machine readable information.
I don't know how things are going in terms of getting relationships between legal entities entered into the LEI repository. My personal wish list is that:
- The FASB and IASB come up with a common description of the components of an entity and use those terms consistently within US GAAP and IFRS.
- The SEC starts allowing or requiring LEIs in XBRL-based financial filings to the SEC.
- The SEC starts requiring public companies to report exhibit 21, the schedule of subsidiaries, in machine readable form rather than in HTML. LEIs should be used to identify registrants and the subsidiaries of the registrant.
- The IFRS and US GAAP XBRL taxonomies coordinate their XBRL dimensions or [Axis] for breaking down an entity into components such as "Business Segments" and "Geographic Area" and such. Preferably, those dimensions would be defined by XBRL International or mapped from US GAAP to IFRS using XBRL definition relations such as "essence-alias".
This is a great step forward for Fintech and Regtech!
Charlie
in Digital Financial Reporting
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Workflow and the YED Graph Editor
As I have pointed out in the past, you need syntax rules, business domain semantics (or business logic) rules, and workflow or process rules to effectively exchange information.
Having figured out the syntax and business domain semantics pieces, I am not diving into workflow.
An excellent tool relating to workflow that I have discovered is the yED Graph Editor. The reason the yED Graph Editor is so good is that (a) it is free, (b) it works on Windows and the Mac OS, and (c) it supports a couple of different standard workflow syntaxes.
Accountants are trained to understand workflow, document workflow, and read workflow documentation. However, accountants still tend to focus on human-readable workflow documentation and never really consider the idea of machine-readable workflow documentation. This will change.
There are two workflows that I am focusing on currently. The first is financial report creation workflow. The second is accounting process workflow starting at the general ledger level.
More to come, so stay tuned.
Here is an online version of the yED Graph Editor.
