You can break down the information contained within a digital financial report such as an SEC XBRL financial filing in many helpful ways. Here are some helpful breakdowns of the report elements and report components which make up SEC XBRL financial filings.
For my set of 7160 SEC XBRL financial filings (all 10-K filings), the following summarizes the report elements of those filings, averages per filing, average per report component, and extension rate percentages for each report element category:
(Click on the image for a larger view)
Some items of interest.
- Categories of report elements: The first thing to note is that the pieces of a digital financial report are identifiable and fit into categories. It is not really appropriate call any piece of a report by the term "tag" or "element" because no one knows if you mean report element, concept, axis, member, table, line items, abstracts or reported facts. Using the more specific term conveys more meaning.
- Lots of small pieces: The average report component has 6.7 concepts.
The following breakdown is even more insightful in my opinion. Here is information about concepts and extension concepts grouped by report component category:
(Click to view larger image)
Understand is that a third of all report components are text blocks. So we should look at text blocks and detail components separately. We should also look at statements and disclosures separately.
And so in tuning this you can see that the average report component which is a statement has 20 concepts and the average disclosure has 7.
You can break this down even further, by disclosure. Here is a summary of concept usage for a select number of report components:
(Click to view larger image)
What will really be interesting is when you can analyze the information communicated within the disclosures themselves! I am working on that. Computational linguistics seems to be useful for that. More to come.