Demystify dimensions for XBRL’s Multi dimensional constructs
James Cameron’s Avatar is one of the heaviest hitting movies in the box office, not just because it is a great movie but also because it is an epic adventure in 3D. Face it, we like 3d because of the additional context of depth. If you consider sound as the fourth dimension the experience becomes even more immersive. It took a long time for animation to come from two dimensional films of old to today’s 3D standard, but how does that even relate to XBRL? We know the background from the foreground in 2D movies, but it is not until we add the third dimension that a computer can discern the difference and XBRL works in a similar way.
We say XBRL is multidimensional, but are we talking space-time continuum or financial reporting? Space is usually referred to in three dimensions up-down, forward-backward and side-to-side; add in the dimension of time and you start to sound like a mathematical theorist. Accountants traditionally don’t think about financial information in terms of dimensions, rather they read a flat page and the data makes sense to the human brain. XBRL is what some call a logical model, one that can be read by a machine, one that can consume multi dimensional data. What does this mean to an accountant tagging in XBRL?
The following is the evolution of how we apply each dimension to financial facts. Financial reporting facts always have three “axis” and can have even more. Each fact has an entity, a reporting period, a financial concept and sometimes an additional dimensions to provide additional context (such as a reporting segment, also referred to as a member). XBRL goes even further by qualifying each dimension with specific attributes and measurements like Dollars and Euros, Debits and Credits and so on. Are you sold, that accounting is better in 3D?
I can’t decide if this blog is meant to be informative or if I was just looking for an avenue to have fun with the concept of a hypercube, draw a pretty picture, and tell you that financial reporting somehow relates to James Cameron’s Avatar. I hope it does serve some purpose by demystifying one very complex term, hypercube, and what it means for financial reporting
Tags: hypercube
