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April 27th, 2011 by Phil Mennona, CPA - Senior XBRL Compliance Manager
Sign Values in XBRL – Part 3: Features and Tools to Assist in the Review Process
Now that we have discussed some of the complexity surrounding appropriate sign, filers should not be scared. Mature software tools can do much of this review work for you as well as highlight areas of risk visually.
First, the software tool should be able to validate against patterns for one-way reporting elements. If Accumulated Depreciation is entered as a negative, sophisticated tools like Crossfire can warn the user of a potential issue. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Compliance, XBRL | No Comments »
April 26th, 2011 by Phil Mennona, CPA - Senior XBRL Compliance Manager
Sign Values in XBRL – Part 2: How to Apply the Sign Concepts to an Indirect Cash Flow Statement
Applying the correct sign to an indirect cash flow statement may be particularly confusing because the correct balance types for Net Income and Adjustments to Net Income are considered differently than the balance types for elements in the rest of the cash flow statement. The following information provides clarification.
In the figure below, the taxonomy used was created in such a way that the Adjustments to Net Income section uses some of the same elements that are used in the income statement. The instance document values in the Adjustments to Net Income section of the cash flow statement should be reported with an instance document balance that is consistent with its income statement balance. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Compliance, XBRL | No Comments »
April 25th, 2011 by Patrick Quinlan - CEO - (2010 to 2011)
We live in an age of data abundance and opportunity. With the advent of the internet, the automated collection and transfer of data is much easier and faster than ever before. Nevertheless, collecting and transferring data is not the same as connecting data points and transforming that data into useful information.
An example of real information would be “unemployment is up,” or “the cost of creating jobs in California is lower than the cost in Colorado.” Real information means that when we ask specific questions, we get intelligent, transparent answers – without having to sift through data collected using different parameters and structures without any kind of map to connect that data. What we need is a transparency revolution.
Taking action to increase transparency and therefore the comparative capabilities of information, I testified last week in front of Chairman Issa’s Oversight Committee at a field hearing Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Transparency, XBRL | 2 Comments »
April 25th, 2011 by Phil Mennona, CPA - Senior XBRL Compliance Manager
A recent hot topic in XBRL is the issue of reporting the appropriate sign for associated values in an SEC submission. The SEC has focused on this issue in their November 1, 2010 staff observations (http://www.sec.gov/spotlight/xbrl/staff-review-observations-110110.shtml) as have many analysts in the marketplace. The most common of these errors cited by the SEC relates to incorrectly entering an amount as negative when it should be positive. Many XBRL teams and their providers suggest clients carefully review all negative amounts in the submission to diminish the risk of filing with errors, particularly given the SEC’s recent focus.
While less prevalent, there is also a risk of incorrectly submitting a fact with a positive sign when it should be negative. This risk is usually more prevalent with “two-way” reporting concepts (explained later) that could be entered as a positive or negative. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Compliance, XBRL | No Comments »
April 22nd, 2011 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor
In Dare to Share 3 I referred to the paper by Garcia and Gil about linking XBRL data to the semantic web. Roberto Garcia has another paper covering very similar ground called Triplificating and Linking XBRL Financial Data. Here I just want to comment on some stats from their efforts.
However, just in case anyone is mystified… Triplification does not refer to triple filtered Irish whisky or triple filtered Stella Artois, the Belgian lager with the famously smooth outcome, but converting data into triples, one of the pillars of the semantic web. Personally I find a few lagers and whisky chasers quite useful when trying to get to the grips with anything to do with the semantic web, but then I’m no Roberto Garcia (didn’t someone make a movie called Bring me the head of Roberto Garcia?). Anyway I digress as I sit here among the remains of a Stella six pack and a half-empty bottle of Jameson. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: RDF
Posted in Analytics, Communication, XBRL | 1 Comment »
April 22nd, 2011 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor
I thought it was about time to catch up on what’s happening with Integrated Reporting (IR) so it was good to see the initiative now has its own website and roadmap. The Federation of European Accountants has already published a factsheet on IR and the ACCA’s Accountancy Futures provides a useful overview of IR – I particularly liked the fact that the word ‘holistic’ is creeping in and the perspective of the ACCA’s Rachel Jackson. But if you want a good place to start catching up on IR, other than the website, try this free PDF download from HBS: The Landscape of Integrated Reporting.
Tags: IR
Posted in Analytics, Communication, Sustainability, Transparency | No Comments »
April 22nd, 2011 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor
In case you are interested – or curious because you are involved with a ‘Controlled Foreign Company’ – the UK’s HMRC have produced a summary of when, how and what to tag if you are submitting accounts to HMRC in the UK. It all sounds so easy. I don’t know what all the fuss was about…
Tags: HMRC
Posted in XBRL | No Comments »
April 21st, 2011 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor
Readers of this blog will know that I’m always harping on about the relative lack of support for XBRL in ERP systems – preventing ‘flow-through’ of XBRL tagged transactional data that would avoid most of the need for cumbersome ‘after-the-fact’ tagging.
So it’s good to see that the momentum for XBRL support in ERP systems is increasing, albeit slowly, as evidenced by this summary page – Leading ERP vendors Making Strategic Moves to Support XBRL and Meet Mandates – provided by the 22nd XBRL International Conference website.
Tags: ERP
Posted in XBRL | No Comments »
April 21st, 2011 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor
In this third Dare to Share post I want to share some more insight I gained from the online book Linking Enterprise Data, edited by David Wood – specifically from the chapter Linking XBRL Financial Data by Garcia and Gil who usefully propose that:
Consequently, our opinion is that the best short term approach in order to get financial and business data to the Semantic Web is not to propose and alternative language based on Semantic Web technologies, but to apply methods to map existing XBRL to semantic metadata. This also seems the best option in the short and midterm to populate the Web of Data with business information.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Analytics, Communication, Transparency | No Comments »
April 21st, 2011 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor
I wasn’t very familiar with the Linked Data Initiative (LDI) until I came across this online book Linking Enterprise Data, edited by David Wood. As Bernadette Hyland says on p.57 :
The basic assumption of Linked Data is that the usefulness and value of data increases the more readily it can be accessed and recombined with other data
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: LDI
Posted in Analytics, Communication, Transparency | No Comments »
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