June 3rd, 2010 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor
Much of the activity around gaining value from the XBRL datastream has focused on reading or visualizing data rendered from XBRL (or iXBRL) instance documents. This is, for example, what our free Crossview tool does very well. But what about writing data? What if you want to write back to the instance document while you are viewing it? For example to create your own customized ‘version’ of the document – perhaps with comments or post-it type notes, colour highlights, links or other numeric data that you want to ‘tag’ into the document for reference purposes.
The point of this post is to solicit a little crowdsourced help as I’m really posing this as a question to both ourselves and to readers of this blog. Is this easy or hard to do? What are the compelling use cases? Does anyone do this already with a commercially available product?
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October 1st, 2009 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor
Campbell Pryde, Chief Standards Officer of XBRL US, has been presenting at the recent National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) event in Baltimore. In a Tweet from the conference, Mr. Pryde said:
campbell pryde: using #XBRL to comp. top 12 assets of financial companies, it took 15mins, 12mins was spent figuring our excel 
We know how to cut that 15 minutes to just 3. It’s called CrossView and CrossView lets you compare the financials of SEC corporate filers without the need for importing and massaging data in Excel. There’s no need for macros and formulas and naturally you can always export data from CrossView into Excel if you wish.
So please. Use CrossView. Gift yourself those precious 12 minutes.
Just think what you can do with 12 minutes: Gaze at the night sky, smell the autumn leaves, break out that pogo stick you have hiding under your desk and see if you can make it to Starbucks…
Tags: CrossView
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August 26th, 2009 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor
Every now and then it’s useful to go back to basics to refresh your thinking on a topic. That’s why it’s worth reminding yourself of section 24 of the IASB’s Framework for the Preparation and Presentation of Financial Statements, which discusses the 4 qualitative characteristics of financial statements, namely:
- Understandability
- Relevance
- Reliability
- Comparability
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Tags: Analytics, CrossView
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May 10th, 2009 by Ted Stavropoulos - Director of Business Development
A very clever developer once asked me, “If you knew the molecular structure of wine would it taste any better?”
I said that – like many people – although I appreciate learning how wine is crafted, I don’t care much about the molecular structure. In the end, what I wanted was to enjoy the wine with my meal.
Similarly, XBRL as a technology will enable a number of process transformations, but each of those will be front-ended by purpose-built software; the technical aspects of XBRL are certainly interesting, but only for the right audience. End users will enjoy these benefits relative to the ease of using data within the context of their own work.
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Tags: Analytics, Customer, Products
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