On Monday, XBRL US released another of set of Resolutions from its Best Practices Committee, a group that I am happy to be a participant. The goal of the Committee is to establish best practices guidance that will increase the consistency and accuracy of XBRL data. While the SEC has established its own set of guidance including the EDGAR Filer Manual, Office of Interactive Data FAQ’s, Staff Observations, and Compliance & Disclosure Interpretations, there are still many remaining areas of variance in terms of XBRL preparation on submissions to the SEC. This XBRL US initiative aims to provide some detailed examples and guidance that expand beyond the SEC’s requirements to provide more consistent information going forward. After all, relevant and reliable XBRL analysis is completely dependent on the accuracy and consistency of the underlying data.
The full text should be read for the details, but below is a brief summary of the items included in the most recent Resolutions:
- PP&E – The PP&E element concept implicitly includes capitalized leases and should be used when a company reports PP&E including capitalized leases or when capitalized leases are $0. When capitalized leases are reported separately (this often happens in the airline industry), an element for PP&E excluding capitalized leases should be extended.
- Tagging No Par – When tagging no par stock without any reported issuance value, a fact should either be included as nil for element CommonStockNoParValue or no fact disclosed at all.
- Tagging Partnership or Equity Units on DEI – Filers should use EntityCommonStockSharesOutstanding on DEI even when entities are reporting partnership or other equity related units. Also, the filer should modify the preferred label role to reflect the nature of the equity units being disclosed.
- Components of Stockholders Equity and Class of Stock – When defining the statement of shareholders equity, members that are defined on the on the StatementEquityComponentAxis should not also be defined on the StatementClassOfStockAxis.
- Use of the Parent Company Member – The parent company member should only be used to record the financial details of the parent holding company.
Tags: Best Practices, XBRL US
