Accountant's Tools and Utilities

This page is a summary of tools and utilities which support the needs of accountants and auditors working with digital financial reports such as SEC XBRL financial filings.  This set of tools and utilities excludes software for creating such reports but rather includes tools and utilities which support that process, support the process of reviewing such reports, and other such applications.

These tools are NOT focused on simply "complying" with the SEC mandate but rather they are in support of getting the job done right.  If you get the job done right, you will comply with the SEC mandate; but if you focus on the lower bar of simply complying you many not be doing a good job creating a proper digital financial report.

This page contains information which explains what it means to do a good job.  Basically, these tools help an accountant be successful.  The tools support the process of proving to yourself that any digital financial report is a true and fair representation of the financial information of the reporting entity which provides the financial report.

  • XBRL Cloud EDGAR Dashboard: This tool provides insight into how to create SEC XBRL financial reports and other digital financial reports in that it has a list of the many, many financial reports created by SEC filers which serve as examples. Each public company financial report has a list of verification errors which provides insight as to the quality of that report.  Each report can be examined using a free "Viewer".
  • WebFilings Taxonomy Analyzer: This tool allows accountants to look at the taxonomy of an SEC XBRL financial filing. The primary advantage of this tool is that it allows you to look at two taxonomies side-by-side and compare them.
  • Excel-based Taxonomy Comparison Tool: The taxonomy comparison tool looks line-by-line at a taxonomy of one SEC submission and compares that with another SEC submission (same reporting entity between two periods, same section for two different reporting entities, etc) and highlights the difference between the two taxonomy sections.  The limitation of this tool is that it only works on filed SEC submissions which are publically available.  However, the Excel code is modifiable and anyone who understands how to write VBA (Excel macros) could make this work on any XBRL taxonomy, filed or not.
  • Official US GAAP Taxonomy (2013): This is the entire US GAAP Taxonomy (2013) shown within a handy viewing application. The primary benefit of this tool is that you can search through the entire taxonomy. (This is another view of the 2013 US GAAP taxonomy.)
  • Reporting templates: This is a set of about 75 high-quality reporting templates which are well modeled, supported by business rules which prove that all computations work correctly, and are otherwise good examples of how to properly represent financial information using XBRL.
  • Examples of expressing fundamental accounting concepts correctly (584 examples): This is a set of 584 SEC XBRL financial filings which represent fundamental accounting concepts correctly which allows for highly reliable reuse of the information contained within the financial report.