Digital Financial Reporting

For the past four months I have been poking and prodding 7,160 SEC XBRL financial filings.  All were 10-K filings. If you follow my blog, the results of this poking and prodding has been made available piece-by-piece.  This document provides a summary of my analysis. The document pulls all this information into one place, summarizes my conclusions, and provides some recommendations for those creating taxonomies or building systems which utilize XBRL.

The primary drivers for the analysis was:

1. Understand how to build better XBRL taxonomies
2. Understand the dynamics of concept extension by SEC public company filers
3. Understand how to create quality SEC XBRL financial filings
4. Understand the dynamics of comparability of SEC XBRL financial filings

The following is a summary of the results of my analysis:

• 99.9% pass XBRL technical syntax rules 
• 86.1% pass Automated SEC EDGAR Filer Manual (EFM) rules
• 97.9% pass US GAAP Taxonomy Model Structure 
• 95.8% pass US GAAP Domain Level Rules 
• 79.1% provide Roll up rules for balance sheet, income statement, cash flow statement 
• 99.2% provide a detectable "root of reporting entity" so that information can be properly discovered using automated processes
• 98.0% report 51 fundamental accounting concepts and those concepts adhere to 21 unchangeable relationships

 Go to the PDF document above which provides a "Conclusions Reached" section and a "Recommendations" section.