Digital Financial Reporting

The group creating the CAFR Taxonomy for financial reporting by state and local governmental entities has released a public exposure demonstration CAFR Taxonomy.

This is the main entry point into the CAFR Taxonomy.

In addition, there were nine Inline XBRL documents that have been created using that taxonomy; here are the Inline XBRL documents, the governmental entity the financial information is for, and who created the document:

1. County of Albemarle, VA (EZ-XBRL)
2. Ashland, VA (EZ-XBRL)
3. Alexandria, VA (Sole practitioner)
4. Bristol, VA (EZ-XBRL)
5. Falls Church, VA (Sole practitioner)
6. State of Georga (Workiva)
7. Loudon County, VA (Sole practitioner)
8. St. Petersburg, FL (Thales Consulting)
9. Virginia Beach, VA (Thales Consulting)
10. State of Utah (Workiva)
11. County of Culpeper, VA  (EZ-XBRL)
12. County of Fauquier, VA (EZ-XBRL)
13. Hillsborough County District School Board, (IRIS Business)
14. Jacksonville Aviation Authority, FL (IRIS Business)
15. County of McHenry, IL (DataTracks)

So, they look pretty. But how good are they?

I took the URLs for all of these financials, put them into TWO RSS feeds that are machine readable:

• Look at files using an Inline XBRL Viewer.
• Machine readable, direct to Inline XBRL document.

I ran the 9 document through XBRL Cloud validation and this is what I got. Hard to tell exactly what is going on; of the 9 only three were even validationed:

  (Click image for larger view) 

These look very nice, the creators get an A+ for presenting the information nicely.  I also give the files an A+ for XHTML syntax, all are 100% valid XHTML.  There seem to be a lot of XHTML formatting issues like attributes on elements that are not allowed.

But I give these XBRL-based financials a D- for machine-readability.  Plenty of room for improvement.