Phil Mennona, CPA comments on Staff Observations from the Review of Interactive Data Financial Statements, published December 13, 2011. Filers should take a moment to review the new SEC Staff Observations.  Most of these observations reemphasize areas discussed in previous Staff Observations, including Rendering, Negative Values, Extended Elements, and Completeness of Tagging.  It should be [...]

Phil Mennona, CPA – Senior XBRL Compliance Manager discusses units of measure in XBRL filings. The final part of my blog will discuss units of measure which is another common area of focus by auditors. First, let’s talk about the importance of units of measure. This concept is usually pretty obvious to most accountants. Some [...]

Phil Mennona, CPA – Senior XBRL Compliance Manager discusses calculation validation of XBRL filings. The previous blog discussed a few considerations and limitations when including calculation relationships in the XBRL exhibits. In this section I will discuss calculation validation. Calculation validation is an item that is usually checked by validation tools and highlighted by auditors [...]

Phil Mennona, CPA – Senior XBRL Compliance Manager discusses limitations and considerations when including calculation relationships in XBRL filings. In the last section of this blog series, I discussed the decimals attribute. In the next two blog sections, I will describe items related to calculations. In this section, I will discuss some limitations and considerations [...]

Phil Mennona, CPA – Senior XBRL Compliance Manager discusses how to effectively use the decimals attribute. In the first section of this 5 part blog, I talked about the critical issue of negative values. While many negative value issues significantly reduce the quality of data, I mentioned that it is important to scrutinize auditor comments [...]

Phil Mennona, CPA – Senior XBRL Compliance Manager discusses issues with incorrect signs in filings and how it can significantly impact the quality of data. Through our experience with providing over 2,000 XBRL Exhibits to SEC filers, we have worked with a number of audit firms (primarily the Big 4) that assist clients in the [...]

Phil Mennona, CPA – Senior XBRL Compliance Manager introduces a 5 part blog series on simple ways to improve the quality of your XBRL filings. As more companies start to abide by the SEC’s XBRL mandate, this process has forced everyone to learn from their mistakes and evolve with the changes it has produced. Not [...]

Back in June 1, 2011 the AICPA released its “Exposure Draft – XBRL Principles and Criteria” and requested comments by July 15th.  The “XBRL Principles and Criteria” document will help form a basis for understanding and measuring many aspects of data quality in XBRL-formatted documents.  Comments on the Exposure Draft (including Rivet’s) have been posted.

Last night the SEC posted new Staff Observations dated 6/15/11which include the SEC’s observations about some of the most common and significant issues from the filings analyzed by the SEC.  Some of the more notable items included in the document are: 1) Format of the statements, 2) Negative Values, 3) Extended Elements, 4) Completeness of [...]

Earlier today, I listened in on PwC’s webinar “PwC’s Assurance Hot Topics webcast series – Spring PwC XBRL Webinar: How to make the best out of the XBRL Situation.”  If you weren’t able to listen in, I’d seek out the archive and slide deck – (I’d include a link here, but I don’t think it [...]

Sign Values in XBRL – Part 3: Features and Tools to Assist in the Review Process Now that we have discussed some of the complexity surrounding appropriate sign, filers should not be scared.  Mature software tools can do much of this review work for you as well as highlight areas of risk visually. First, the [...]

Sign Values in XBRL – Part 2: How to Apply the Sign Concepts to an Indirect Cash Flow Statement Applying the correct sign to an indirect cash flow statement may be particularly confusing because the correct balance types for Net Income and Adjustments to Net Income are considered differently than the balance types for elements [...]

A recent hot topic in XBRL is the issue of reporting the appropriate sign for associated values in an SEC submission.  The SEC has focused on this issue in their November 1, 2010 staff observations (http://www.sec.gov/spotlight/xbrl/staff-review-observations-110110.shtml) as have many analysts in the marketplace.  The most common of these errors cited by the SEC relates to [...]

On Monday, XBRL US released another of set of Resolutions from its Best Practices Committee, a group that I am happy to be a participant.  The goal of the Committee is to establish best practices guidance that will increase the consistency and accuracy of XBRL data.  While the SEC has established its own set of [...]