Digital Financial Reporting

I am holding out this TB Financial Reporting Scheme XBRL Taxonomy as a best practices model financial reporting XBRL taxonomy.  What I want to supplement this model with another model that uses XBRL dimensions and all of the information patterns in the Proof representation.  If you wanted a model that already uses XBRL dimensions, I would point you to the Not-for-Profit XBRL taxonomy for the time being. That XBRL taxonomy is good, but I want to modify the interface to the taxonomy.

This model helps those that are interested in understanding the nuances and subtleties of how XBRL taxonomies work. This is a very basic XBRL taxonomy with both positive and negative examples that help professional accountants understand the ramification of XBRL taxonomy creation choices.  The best practices model was created by taking the very best ideas of other XBRL taxonomies.

To get the most of this best practices model, I would encourage you to: 

1. Watch this video playlist, Understanding the Financial Report Logical System.
2. Work through the Corportate Financial Reporting Examples.
3. Understand the Logical Theory Describing Financial Report.
4. Read through the Essence of Accounting. 

This XBRL taxonomy and the best practices used to created are based on engineering and testing, testing, and more testing.  The following is a summary of software tested to understand software capabilities and interoperability and software used to test the XBRL taxonomy and XBRL instances used to exercise the XBRL taxonomy to be sure it is functioning as expected:

• Pesseract
• Pacioli
• XBRL Cloud
• XBRL Query
• UBmatrix XPE

The following is a summary of the beginnings of a comprehensive financial reporting semantics conformance suite to test and certify software for XBRL-based digital financial reporting: 

1. Preliminary conformance suite
2. TB Financial Reporting Scheme report repository
3. Not-for-Profit report repository
4. MINI prototype financial reporting scheme report repository
5. XASB prototype financial reporting scheme report repository
6. Mastering XBRL-based Financial Reporting examples

Any feedback will be gladly accepted.  I will explain more over the coming weeks.

I heard an excellent phrase today: always on audit.  THAT is how audit's should be.  Always on.  That term comes from Engine B who is creating a Common Data Model (CDM) for audit. They say it will enable lower cost audits and easier audit rotation between audit firms.  In this article, Engine B describes always on audit:

Within 10 years some of us will be performing a highly-automated, always-on, data-led audit. Instead of starting with the financial statements and testing samples, auditors will be using machine-vision to confirm 100% of basic transactions to e-invoices.

Engine B is the fourth organization trying to make audits more effecient through standardization. So, Engine B has their Common Data Model (CDM). Here is v1.1 of that CDM. ISO has their Audit Data Services. The AICPA has their Dynamic Audit Solution Iniative.  OECD has their guidance for standard audit files.

All this dovetails nicely with my notion of automation of the record to report process. Perhaps all this will help fix auditing.

It also fits into what Mindbridge.ai is doing with their AI Auditor.

XBRL-based financial reports are part of this equation.  Gotta make sure they are properly functioning logical systems.

This article helps you understand the next generation of professional services.