Really, really good stuff from Michelle Savage (XBRL-US) on Investor Relations and XBRL

August 30th, 2009 by Emily Huang - VP, Business Technology & Cofounder

A recent interview published on www.irwebreport.com has caught my attention. In the article, Michelle Savage (VP of Communications at XBRL-US) has provided some really, really good advice for Investor Relations Officers (IROs) about what they need to know and do about XBRL.

According to Michelle, the biggest challenges from an IRO standpoint are:

The challenge is getting educated and feeling comfortable with what elements are being chosen — and being comfortable with how your own financials are converted into XBRL. That comes down to understanding not the technology, per se, but rather how your financial guys define your statements using XBRL tags, as well as how your industry or market peers and competitors do the same thing.

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Innovation Diffusion

August 30th, 2009 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor

The release of the AICPA’s history of XBRL, The story of our new language, reminded me to lookup an article I wrote almost exactly 10 years ago in Business Finance magazine called XML Means Business, in which I confidently concluded:

All kinds of applications that finance managers now rely on will soon use XML to import and export data. Don’t panic if your current ERP system, financial report writer, workflow application or document-management system does not support XML; compatibility with this technology will be high on every vendor’s upgrade wish list when its product’s next major release is in development. But if you are buying a new system that imports or exports data and claims to be Web-enabled, see whether the product includes XML support. No XML, no comment.

Of course I was wrong. And I had hair then. Read the rest of this entry »


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Financial Ecosystem Set to Grow in UK?

August 30th, 2009 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor

According to the UK’s HMRC (Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs) website:

From April 2011 under UK Government proposals, all companies, clubs, societies, associations and other unincorporated bodies who are required to make a Company Tax Return will have to:

- file their company tax returns online for all returns delivered after 31 March 2011 for accounting periods ending after 31 March 2010, using a specified XBRL data standard for accounts and computations and

- pay their Corporation Tax electronically.

Under these proposals HMRC will not accept:

- a company tax return and required attachments filed on paper when it should have been filed online

- any returns filed online with accounts and computations sent as Portable Document Format (PDF) attachments – all returns delivered after 31 March 2011 for accounting periods ending after 31 March 2010, must be filed using inline XBRL (iXBRL).

This means that all corporate tax filings and legal entity/group statutory accounts prepared under UK GAAP or IFRS will be filed to HMRC using a version of XBRL, significantly enlarging the taxonomy-based financial information ecosystem both in the UK and globally. Read the rest of this entry »


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Impact Analysis

August 30th, 2009 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor

It’s easy to forget that not everyone is completely focused on monetary gain when they invest in a business – an increasing number of individual and institutional “philanthropic” investors also care about the social returns generated by a business. Read the rest of this entry »


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XBRL: Some Future Directions

August 30th, 2009 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor

The recent XBRL US Pacific Rim Technology Workshop in Santa Clara, CA resulted in some interesting key findings that are worth commenting on while we wait for the official discussion paper to be published. Read the rest of this entry »


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Reporting: Back to Basics

August 26th, 2009 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor

Every now and then it’s useful to go back to basics to refresh your thinking on a topic. That’s why it’s worth reminding yourself of section 24 of the IASB’s Framework for the Preparation and Presentation of Financial Statements, which discusses the 4 qualitative characteristics of financial statements, namely:

  1. Understandability
  2. Relevance
  3. Reliability
  4. Comparability

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CrossView: 3 Shot Walk Through

August 25th, 2009 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor

Rivet recently released CrossView (read press release) -  a free online tool for finding, viewing and managing SEC XBRL filings that delivers on the promise of interactive data. This post gives you a quick walk-through of the key features using just 3 screenshots from the product.

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