XBRL: the teenage years is nothing to do with banging your head on a taxonomy or sniffing month-end reports fresh from your inkjet. But this ‘Financial Map’ blog post does make a number of good points that are worth repeating here. Having said that I’d guess that this post was in fact authored by a machine that has merely culled nuggets from the web and then compiled them into a barely-logical burbling. How else can you explain EDGAR being compared to the English king of the same name? But anyway the good points to remember about XBRL and XBRL GL are:
MOVING UPSTREAM
XBRL for General Ledger also will impact CPAs in the future. XBRL-GL moves XBRL upstream toward the transaction level by developing XBRL taxonomies for tagging the chart of accounts and accounting transactions. XBRL-GL is not a standard chart of accounts, it’s a standard method to tag existing charts of accounts.
Like Salmon, XBRL tags must go back to their point of origination – the transaction. The greedy bear that sits nearby trying to prevent XBRL moving upstream is called ‘ERP vendors’.
XBRL-GL (NB. Mr. E. Cohen will not like that dash) will allow drilling down from financial statements to trial balances to underlying transactions. Different XBRL-compatible accounting packages will be able to freely transfer information between them. These transfers could be directly between two accounting systems or all of the accounting data could be sent to a central data hub and translated into a common chart of accounts for consolidations.
Since the dawn of the XBRL age (mental image: Charles Hoffman in a bearskin, grunting), many people have pointed out the possibility of XBRL acting as a form of inter-accounting system EDI and as a means for automating much of the cumbersome consolidation and elimination process. But so far we remain relatively close to the ground, covered in hair and still grunting. Or to put it in another Kubrickian way: staring at some big black, shrieking obelisk instead of enjoying cashews and champagne with a Pan-Am stewardess on a moon shuttle as it waltzes through space.
This will be a real timesaver for CPAs who get trial balances and accounting details from their clients to enter into their own trial balance, tax or audit software. As these products become XBRL compatible, CPAs will simply request XBRL files. Although current accounting products have various export capabilities, file formats can vary greatly between products and even between versions of the same product.
Now this will be a major shift. Especially if your CPA is like mine. The only thing mine seems to request is money. I’ve tried to send him XBRL files but he says the bank won’t take them.
Let’s face it. XBRL is still a long way from Nirvana. More like XBRL: the Acne years.
