Unsustainable Reporting

June 9th, 2010 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor

Professor Graham Hubbard of the University of Adelaide has written a useful paper called Unsustainable Reporting that makes a number of interesting recommendations including:

Sustainability reporting must be integrated with the financials.  If this means significant financials need to be ‘double reported’, so be it.  Clearly a smarter way is to integrate current financial reporting with the non-financial elements.

We couldn’t agree more.

And his report finishes up with this:

The development of such future sustainability reporting will be meaningful, credible, comparable information about the key drivers of overall business success, taking account of external impacts of the organisation.   This will mean that sustainability reporting does make a difference to the business case of the organisation.

And XBRL taxonomy-driven reporting will be key to creating this meaningful, credible, comparable information…


Posted in Sustainability | 1 Comment »


Hola! Caja Navarra…Líder Mundial

June 9th, 2010 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor

Guess what? Caja Navarra es la primera compañía del mundo que ha elaborado el Informe de Responsabilidad Social en formato XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language). Kudos to Spain’s Bank of Navarra. The first company in the world to create its sustainability report in XBRL format using the new Spanish cci-rsc taxonomy.

What is the Spanish cci-rsc taxonomy?

The cci-rsc Taxonomy provides technological support for the generation, transmission and processing of Reports on the Corporate Social Responsibility activities and situation of companies and all types of entity by means of the use of a Central Scoreboard of directly comparable indicators.  The use of the taxonomy is intended to promote comparability between companies, to increase corporate transparency and research in the field of the Corporate Social Responsibility at the international level.

Not only does the bank produce an externally validated  XBRL version of the RSC for 2008, it also produces a sustainability report based on the GRI indicators to A+ GRI Checked standard. Real world-class sustainability reporting leadership from Spain. And you just learned the Spanish for XBRL.


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Posted in Sustainability | 5 Comments »


A Sustainability Reporting Manifesto

June 7th, 2010 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor

I’m going to finish up my coverage of the recent Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) conference in Amsterdam with what I guess is a kind of manifesto. I’ll call it the Sustainability Reporting Manifesto. I hope that for every reader who finds it all rather hokey, there will be another who finds it at least a little thought-provoking. Read the rest of this entry »


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Posted in Communication, Sustainability | 1 Comment »


The Accounting Flow Visualizer

June 7th, 2010 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor

The International Journal of Digital Accounting Research recently published an interesting paper called Visualizing Basic Accounting Flows:Does XBRL+Model+Animation=Understanding by four authors from the Oregon State University. They propose an online Accounting Flow Visualizer (AFV) that consumes XBRL data from S.E.C. filings to present a new kind of visualization of a corporate filer’s financial position.

University of Oregon - Accounting Flow Visualizer (AFV)

University of Oregon - Accounting Flow Visualizer (AFV)

While the visualization that the AFV produces is deliberately basic, it doesn’t much matter because as the authors point out “…it makes sense as we explore the analysis utility of XBRL as opposed to its impact on reporting efficiency.” They have focused on the visualization of flows and of change (between filings) so their AFV can be animated to allow both backward and forward animation in the data set. Which all highlights another practical use for XBRL data: Teaching accounting relationships and potentially, financial scenario forensics.


Posted in Analytics, XBRL | 3 Comments »


Document Centricity

June 7th, 2010 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor

Back in July 2009, Ernst and Young UK put out a useful paper called Top 10 XBRL readiness challenges, which I’d like to revisit for a moment. Number 9 in their list was ‘Visualizing the data’. But on closer inspection what they were specifically referring to was presenting the data in a document-centric format and initiatives to help do that e.g. iXBRL. Isn’t it time we moved on from this document-centric fixation? Read the rest of this entry »


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Posted in Analytics, Communication, XBRL | 1 Comment »


Visual Transparency

June 6th, 2010 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor

My colleague Ted Stavropolous over at The Daily Extension is doing a great job focusing attention on what the availability of (eventually) millions of datapoints gathered from XBRL eventstreams (e.g. S.E.C. filing events) will mean in terms of providing a foundation for new financial information and greater transparency. While it’s grand to have all this data available and some means to search and render it like Crossview, the real value comes from visualizing it in interesting ways – like this spending dashboard from the UK”s Where Does My Money Go? Read the rest of this entry »


Posted in Analytics, Communication | 1 Comment »


Now That’s Transparency!

June 4th, 2010 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor

Imagine you wanted to find something out like  - who are the top paid Government officials – how would you go about it?

You might think that you’d have to do a lot of fruitless searching or submit a freedom of information request or maybe pay some specialist data aggregator to buy their expensively researched list for a gazillion dollars.

Or you might just go here and download it as a CSV file. Now that’s transparency.


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Posted in Analytics, Communication | No Comments »


I Hear the Jingle Jangle of Money

June 4th, 2010 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor

It may have slipped your notice, but recently the UK Government put a system online that provides direct access to all kinds of data that the Government collects and publishes. It’s called the Combined Online Information System (COINS) or as the UK Guardian puts it The ultimate public spending database from the UK government.

But what’s interesting about this system is that it’s not just a bunch of links to lots of web pages where you can dig around to find data (which it is). The underlying data has all been tagged in RDF format and organized according to various subject matter ontologies – something that is now being marketed as ‘linked data‘. And the really good news is that this data can be accessed directly via a SQL-like query language called SPARQL or via an API and the output exported to XML. The Google chart mashups alone will keep people busy for years.

According to the Guardian:

The government will today give the public free access to its accounting books for the first time, publishing the entire contents of its spending database – a total of 24m individual entries documenting where public money comes from, what it is spent on and whose pocket it ends up in.

The global financial information ecosystem has just grown by 24 million data points!

Is this not one of the biggest opportunities to drive new reporting applications and financial analytics or what?


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Posted in Analytics, Communication | 1 Comment »


Read/Write Rendering

June 3rd, 2010 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor

Much of the activity around gaining value from the XBRL datastream has focused on reading or visualizing data rendered from XBRL (or iXBRL) instance documents. This is, for example, what our free Crossview tool does very well. But what about writing data? What if you want to write back to the instance document while you are viewing it? For example to create your own customized ‘version’ of the document – perhaps with comments or post-it type notes, colour highlights, links or other numeric data that you want to ‘tag’ into the document for reference purposes.

The point of this post is to solicit a little crowdsourced help as I’m really posing this as a question to both ourselves and to readers of this blog. Is this easy or hard to do? What are the compelling use cases? Does anyone do this already with a commercially available product?


Posted in Usability, XBRL | 3 Comments »


Ooh La La! Tracking French Executive Comp in XBRL

June 3rd, 2010 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor

I just came across this French site that is focused on tracking Directors Remuneration paid to executives in top French companies. Now I’m not certain if the data for this site is coming from an XBRL source but it looks like they are offering the ability to export it as an XBRL instance document, which is interesting.

download-xbrl

download-xbrl

Read the rest of this entry »


Posted in Communication, XBRL | 1 Comment »


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