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September 19th, 2011 by Charlie Hymer, CPA - Regional Sales Director
Charlie Hymer, CPA – Regional Sales Director, reminisces about the old days of financial reporting and how XBRL will forever change its future.
The financial reporting industry has changed drastically over the last 20 years. Not to date myself, but oh well, here goes. I remember when I first started out at Arthur Andersen we didn’t have computers. We used columnar paper and had to continually tape more paper on the end of the spreadsheets to add more columns if the paper wasn’t long enough. To make a change was completely manual—erasing, re-adding, and hoping that everything flowed through properly. In 1989 we got computers to go out in the field. They looked like huge suitcases and we newbies always had to carry them because they were so heavy. We used Lotus 123 and thought that it couldn’t get any better than that. Then a little company called Microsoft gave us Excel and Word. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Crossfire Controller
Posted in Analytics, Control, Rivet, Solutions, XBRL | No Comments »
July 16th, 2010 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor
Every now and then I like to revisit Rivet’s XBRL journey mantra - Comply. Control. Communicate. – to remind ourselves that we are really only at stage 1 of the XBRL journey and there is a long way to go.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Communication, Compliance, Control, XBRL | 1 Comment »
July 6th, 2010 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor
As a follow up to my previous 4 Lines Is All It Takes post, I’d like to elaborate on what the those 4 sustainability reporting lines would actually report. A Sustainability 10-Q (simplified) if you like. Just as a reminder, the 4 lines are:
INCOME STATEMENT
Sustainability Revenue
Sustainability Costs
BALANCE SHEET
Sustainability Assets
Sustainability Liabilities
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Analytics, Control, Sustainability | 1 Comment »
June 25th, 2010 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor
Many of you who have followed the progress of XBRL for over a decade are probably wondering: when is it going to be used to deliver a key benefit that was identified right from the start – improved control over internal reporting? Today we are stuck on compliance and control looks a long way off, let alone communication. What’s holding back the use of XBRL for internal reporting? Well I think I know the answer. It’s taxonomies or more precisely taxonomy shock. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Control, Taxonomies, XBRL | 1 Comment »
June 17th, 2010 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor
Being a Brit in Louisiana right now probably feels like being a Brit in a Mel Gibson movie. The environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico has made a villain of British Petroleum, hammering their stock price, damaging their reputation and surely lowering the morale of their employees, many of them hard-working Americans. There are undoubtedly many lessons to be learned from this tragedy and one of them is the importance of impact reporting. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: BP
Posted in Communication, Compliance, Control, Sustainability | 2 Comments »
February 22nd, 2010 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor
Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) spending is increasing in the face of more regulation and investor demand, which is why Continuous Control Monitoring (CCM) software is expected to be a top investment in 2010 according to analysts AMR Research. The interest in CCM is another good reason for using XBRL internally within your organization. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: CCM
Posted in Communication, Control, XBRL | No Comments »
February 18th, 2010 by Charlie Hymer, CPA - Regional Sales Director
The cloud of fear surrounding the next phase of the XBRL Mandate, Detail Tagging, has been growing darker as vendors release the numbers on just how many tags are going to be required to be compliant. The truth is, some companies’ notes have a whole lot of numbers (sometimes in the thousands) that are going to need tags when the time comes. Because of the breadth and intricacy of such an undertaking, it’s important to make sure that your provider has a grasp on what they’re doing. At the end of the day, the printer doesn’t sign off on your financials, you do. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Detail Tagging, XBRL
Posted in Compliance, Control, XBRL | 1 Comment »
February 2nd, 2010 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor
The Auditing Practices Board (APB) of the Financial Reporting Council (FRC) has published a useful set of guidelines for auditors, XBRL Tagging of Information in Audited Financial Statements – Guidance for Auditors, which also functions as a good introduction to certain aspects of the use of iXBRL in the UK. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Auditing
Posted in Compliance, Control, XBRL | 1 Comment »
January 25th, 2010 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor
Eric Cohen and other XBRL-GL evangelists have been advocating the idea of a seamless audit trail for some time now. Potentially there’s a lot of complexity to this idea involving metamodels of ERP data in UML and so on. But I’m a simple person, so I tend to think of the seamless audit trail as a refinement of a basic function of any accounting or financial reporting software package: Drilldown. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: drilldown, ERP
Posted in Control, XBRL | 4 Comments »
January 18th, 2010 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor
The results are in from the November 2009 survey of XBRL Preparedness by the AICPA/XBRL US. The good news is that almost half the respondents (45%) said that preparing their XBRL filings was easier second time around. But then most things are. On the other hand respondents recognized the challenges of mapping/tag selection (15%), getting educated (10%), and validation (9%). Now I know this was not part of the survey remit but an aspect of ‘preparedness’ that was not addressed is what businesses are preparing to do when all their peers and competitors are also filing in XBRL? Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Communication, Compliance, Control, Uncategorized, XBRL | 1 Comment »
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