Digital Financial Reporting

Distributed distributed ledgers (i.e. blockchain or otherwise) and XBRL are a match made in heaven.  Blockchain-anchored XBRL takes XBRL-based digital financial reporting to an entirely new level of usefulness.  Both transparency and trust are enhanced.

XBRL-based digital reports provide several capabilities: (1) a high-quality "payload" of machine readable reported facts, (2) a machine readable logical description of the "model" that payload, (3) machine readable declarative "rules" that help control processes and manage quality, and (4) a global standard technical syntax that enables the physical "transport" of the payload, model, and rules.

Digital distributed ledgers which a lot of people refer to as blockchain provides several additional capabilities: (1) an unchangeable record of a report transaction, (2) enhanced transparency because every detail can be tracked and repeated, (3) enhanced trust due to an inability to unintentionally or intentionally tamper with a report, (4) a plethora of service enhancements because of the enhanced transparency and trust.

While XBRL-based digital financial reports provide a high quality universal financial reporting framework that is both human-readable and machine-readable; general business reporting can benefit from the proven best practice based methods created for financial reporting.

I am not the only one that sees the benefits of blockchain, smart contracts, and the other "stuff" that makes up a digital distributed ledger.  XBRLChain has similar ideas. This one hour video explains what they are thinking.  Auditchain has their ideas which you can read in their white paper. Logical Contracts focuses on smart contracts that are logic-based declarative rules business professionals can understand (as contract to imperative or procedural software code as smart contracts).

If you don't understand the difference between imperative and declarative you should consider reading this article.

XBRLChain has a working prototype you can try.  I created a MOCK BLOCKCHAIN DIGITAL LEDGER to try and communicate my ideas. It does not actually work but it will give you an idea of what I am trying to achieve.

Logical Contracts has a prototype you can fiddle with related to smart contracts.