Digital Financial Reporting

The Forbes article by Barnet Sherman, The Four Letters Transforming The Municipal Bond Market And Government Finance, points out:

With accurate data comes extensive data functionality. There are nearly an endless number of applications for data to be used in. Software engineers can develop automated, repeatable processes so data can be analyzed, measured, ranked, benchmarked, managed, modeled, tested, shared, exchanged, outlined, mapped, sorted, templatized, searched, queried, predicted, charted, animated, mined, validated, machine-read, machine-learned, compared, reused, verified, categorized, structured, tracked, screened, referenced, stored and retrieved. Just for starters.

This is why I spend so much time and effort trying to understand why mistakes occur, figure out how to detect mistakes, figure out how to prevent mistakes, and otherwise contribute to the creatino of high-quality XBRL-based digital financial reports.

More information on state and local govenment use of XBRL can be found here:  Workiva and The Data Foundation have published another report, Transparent State and Local Financial Reporting: The Case for an Open Data CAFR, per the authors "outlines the steps necessary to create an infrastructure for open data CAFRs, anticipates challenges to open data adoption, and examines the impact currently-pending federal reforms could have on the process."

As I understand it there are about 90,000 state and local governmental entities in the United States.  Those entities tend to use governmental accounting standards provided by the GASB to create their financial reports.

If software engineers could get their act together in terms of ease of use and quality; then XBRL-based digital financial reporting could take off.  Until they do, it simply will not happen.  It should not because low quality information is useless. Metacrap is of no use to anyone.

Software vendors seem to be very short sighted.  Do you recognize that the market for creating financial reports is 25 million in the US alone?  XBRL-based reporting of public companies to the SEC is table scraps.