Digital Financial Reporting

The improvement is slow and steady which might not be sexy, but the quality of public company XBRL-based digital financial reports continues to improve.

A second software vendor/filing agent, Merrill, joins DataTracks with over 90% of all of the XBRL-based public company digital financial reports which they create being consistent with all 22 of the basic, common sense fundamental accounting concept relations rules.

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As can be seen in the four month comparison and comparison across individual consistency check:

• Between June 2015 and September 2015, the total number of public company XBRL-based digital financial reports consistent with all 22 of the basic, common sense fundamental accounting concept relations went from 70.6% to 75.8%.
• For the same period, the total number of inconsistencies with those rules dropped from 3,001 to 2,424.
• If you consider each individual consistency check of which there are 150,040; 98.38% of all fundamental accounting concept relations are shown to be consistent with expectation.
• The least consistent rule is 96.3% which means that at least that percentage of the total 6,820 are consistent with the rule. That means only 3.7% are inconsistent with that rule for some reason.

 Comparison across four months:

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 Information per fundamental accounting concept consistency check:

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I don't know if the XBRL US Data Quality Committee is considering adding these basic, common sense fundamental accounting concept relations to their battery of consistency checks.  I would encourage you to ask members of the committee why they would not add these basic common sense rules.