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?

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…

1. Understandability
2. Relevance
3. Reliability
4. Comparability

The XBRL community is somewhat energized about the real practical difficulties of ‘guaranteeing’ report data reliability and comparability given various taxonomy flavors, erroneous use of elements to tag report data by inexperienced filers and extension ‘creep’. And so they should be. Reliable and comparable data is supposed to be one of the key deliverables and benefits of XBRL taxonomy-based reporting. But here I want to focus a little more on ‘understandability’ and  ‘relevance’ as these are what tend to energize software developers – closely connected to industry terms such as ‘fit for purpose’ and ‘usability’ that businesses who buy software should care about.

Understandability is primarily driven by presentation. It’s hard to describe a stunning landscape in words and communicate the impact it had on you but it’s a lot easier to do by just showing someone a single photograph. So the way reports are presented and presentation of different perspectives of the same report data, preferably in-context and interactively via charts or drilldowns, facilitate deeper understanding of the numbers. Of course you can learn a lot from a ‘traditional’ report presented as a PDF – perhaps 80%+ of what you need to know. But it maybe that 10-20% of what you can’t ’see’, without an interactive presentation, contains what you really should understand about the numbers.

A simple example of how interactive presentation helps understandability is by making it easy to confirm who a report relates to and what exactly a report line is actually presenting. Rivet CrossView does this using popups, as shown below:

Fig. 1: Report understandability

Relevance is partly driven by role and intention. Who are you and why are you here? For example: Are you an individual investor or a professional financial analyst? Are you thinking of buying or selling stock? What role and intention do is provide a frame for delivering relevant data. CrossView helps you manage a report to suit the role and intention by providing the means to chart and export the report or view the content of any report section you are interested in:

Fig 2: Report relevance

Role and intention-based report framing may require the presentation of financial statement formats that are non-standard, that mix and match elements from conventional statement formats, in order to create new perspectives. Something that taxonomy-based reporting has the potential to facilitate by using XBRL elements as building blocks, unlike traditional PDF or even spreadsheet-based reporting that depends on error-prone cut and pastes.

Dragon Tag

Dragon Tag is an add-on to Word and Excel. Since most companies will already have their notes to the financial statements in Word, this is a very simple process. Simply find the correct element using our powerful taxonomy search engine (see Tag it Your Way! for more on “search”) and drag it to the selected note in the document. It’s as easy as 1, 2, 3 as shown in the following screen shots.

CrossTag

CrossTag is independent of Word and Excel but works nicely with both. For this example, we’ll assume the notes are in a Word document. The steps involve creating a template which can be re-used each quarter, so this part of the process only needs to be done once. After that, it’s just a matter of changing the date on the template and copying and pasting the text from Word into the source document. The steps are illustrated in the following screen shots.

Preview

In either Dragon Tag or CrossTag, the end result is the same: you’ll have nicely formatted notes. You can easily see the end result using the preview feature in either Dragon Tag or CrossTag. Preview lets you see what your filing looks like on the SEC site without actually having to upload your filing to the site. Rivet built the rendering engine used by the SEC so what you see in preview using our products is the same as what you would see on the SEC preview site. However, if you want to double check, the SEC allows you to preview your filing through the XBRL Previewer located at https://ideapreview.sec.gov/previewer/. Here’s a screen shot of what my instance document looks like there.

As a side note, if you don’t use Rivet products to create XBRL filings, you may be interested in Dragon View which is a tool you can use to preview your filing, compare your filing with others from the same industry or across all industries, and view detailed information about your filing and taxonomy (see http://www.rivetsoftware.com/Products/Dragon_View/Default.aspx). We work hard at Rivet, creating products that take the complexity out of XBRL so you can create professional filings yourself. But remember, if you do get stuck, we’re available to walk you through the process.

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.

Rivet Software is focused on building applications and functionality with end users in mind so that they can realize the benefits of XBRL even if they do not have specialized technical knowledge.

Does the focus on finance and accounting professionals mean that Rivet can’t help other software vendors deliver XBRL-enabled solutions?  No.  Rivet functionality is embedded in multiple solutions.  But more on this in a later post…

On the XBRL.US website there is an “At a Glance” page which describes XBRL, the primary benefits and – just as important – what XBRL is not, as shown below:

End users are in the business of creating, reviewing and analyzing data in context and shouldn’t have to be experts in the underlying technologies. To achieve the primary benefits, XBRL data has to be approachable through applications that mask the complexity of the technology, and expose data that is helpful in making decisions.

Rivet delivers solutions that span the entire process so that end users can create, review, and analyze data leveraging XBRL. In each case, the end user’s approach to the work is paramount.

Here are a few examples of the attention to detail that makes our applications more approachable by end users.

1. Analyze – Extend Excel and Model with Data: All of the XBRL filing data at the SEC is accessible for analysis in Crossfire.  Rivet has enhanced the Excel experience for analysis by automatically including public data and managing spreadsheet hell.  In Crossfire, you have access to all the XBRL filings to date. You drag and drop data onto Excel; the design mode is interactive. Because you do this in the context of the application, you can mix and match internal data and data from public filings, while you manage both financial spreadsheets and updates when new data is filed. Modeling with data is important. When building from scratch, it is much easier for a user to eliminate data (as they refine what they want to know) than to add items. Access to the entire dataset makes it easier to model with data directly in Excel.
2. Review – Easily benchmark your choices against other filings: One of the questions we often get is “What did other filers select in this case?” With Dragon View and Cross Tag that information is immediately available. With Dragon View you can open any instance document including those done by your outsourced vendor. You can read more about this in Emily’s blog entry here.
3. Create – Streamline the process after the initial filing: We have spent time automating the process of producing your 2nd, 3rd and “Nth” instances based on your first filing, regardless of the method you used to produce it.  (Look for a blog on the importance of this in the near future.) Above are just a few examples, but there are many more good examples around workflow, roles, “help me tag”, and other topics on our blog.

In the U.S., understandably, the primary focus is on filing so let’s start here but not stop here…

Whether you use Rivet applications or Rivet functionality embedded within other applications, we are focused on helping end users by leveraging standards and providing access to the vast amount of information that will be available. Providing functionality for the end user now will drive additional uses of XBRL that will realize the primary benefits of XBRL in both the private and public sector.

Now, where is my wine…

Links list:

XBRL at a Glance
http://xbrl.us/Learn/Pages/FactSheet.aspx

Learning About XBRL & Rivet Solutions
http://rivetsoftware.com/Solutions/sec_filers.aspx

SEC Quick Start Premier Plus Package

http://www.rivetsoftware.com/Professional_Services/sec_xbrl_package.aspx

Manage the tagging and filing process with CrossTag User Roles and Workflow
http://blog.rivetsoftware.com/?p=195

Dragon View, Still the most popular XBRL viewer, Just Better!
http://blog.rivetsoftware.com/?p=150

Tag it Your Way!

http://blog.rivetsoftware.com/?p=182