2011 was another exciting year for XBRL. I am indebted to various XBRL ’round-ups’ from the IFRS, XBRL International and others for the data in my take on the year. January 2011 began ominously with a Neroesque statement from the European Banking Authority: We recommend the use of XBRL as it will lead to greater [...]

In my roundup of the XBRL news of 2011 (coming soon), I mention the Integrated Reporting (IR) movement, which has been discussed in this blog over the years. The IR’s discussion document Towards Integrated Reporting: Communicating Value in the 21st Century is well worth a read and also some thought in response to the questions it [...]

We’re having a heat wave here in the UK so as I lay out under my lawn sprinkler (suitably primed with a mixture of spring water and a rather nice chardonnay – me that is, not the lawn sprinkler) I began leafing through one of my favorite journals  - Biological Cybernetics. Yes, I know you [...]

It’s easy to forget that the link between semantics and accounting was acknowledged long before the semantic web and XBRL. Back in 1972, accounting academic Andrew A Haried published a paper in the Journal of Accounting Research called The Semantic Dimensions of Financial Statements. As you can see from page 1 of his paper, he [...]

Many people in Europe might be in favor of value-added tax (VAT) having no future but unfortunately it’s here to stay. So I wondered if XBRL figured in this future and went to a 2010 EU green paper On the future of VAT to find out. I discovered that apparently XBRL does not figure in [...]

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 [...]

I was revisiting Stephen Batchelor’s excellent book Alone with Others when I was struck by some clear links between Buddhism, Excel and XBRL. These center around the interplay between authentication and anxiety. So if you are in the mood for a little noodling on this topic, instead of say scarfing down a sweet but shallow [...]

Using XBRL for sustainability reporting just got a shot in the arm via the Global Reporting Initiative’s (GRI’s) newly announced collaboration with Deloitte in the Netherlands to resurrect the moribund GRI XBRL taxonomy. Hopefully the current taxonomy will be revised and updated to reflect the new demands of so-called ‘integrated reporting’ that expects financial and [...]

Yes. Old grumpy face is back to encourage you to take a look at a new book by W. David Stephenson called Data Dynamite – How Liberating Information Will Transform Our World. The book calls for a 4-step process to liberate data and free it from the shackles of a document-centric world: apply “tags” to [...]

As one of the unofficial sustainability evangelists here at Rivet, I thought you might like to review 7 Sustainability Trends that Every CFO Needs to Know – courtesy of GreenBiz.com – and think about this: Because of the large number of functional areas that report to the CFO, sustainability offers the CFO an opportunity to [...]

Those of you familiar with your Roald Dahl will know that BFG stands for ‘Big Friendly Giant’ (shame on you for thinking that ‘F’ stood for something different). To my knowledge, Charlie Hoffman has never called XBRL a BFG of any kind, but I rather like the cuddly nickname. Anyway, Charlie is set to enlighten [...]

The 2011 Gartner/Financial Executives International (FEI) study is out, based on 344 ‘highly qualified’ respondents of which 75% were CFOs. As with all these surveys, the results contain some dilemmas. 42% of respondents cited Creating an effective environment for sharing relevant information and 43% cited Quality of the data used for business information as technology constraints. [...]

Earlier in 2011, The International Journal of Digital Accounting Research published a paper called The Impact of XBRL: A Delphi Investigation, which reported the results of a panel of ‘experts’ (the ‘delphic’ panel) validating or not various propositions about the future impact of XBRL. The results were interesting, but not surprising. To find out which of [...]

The Global Reporting Initiative has announced that it is working on the next generation of its guidelines for ESG/sustainability/integrated reporting. There seems to be some hope for the rather dormant GRI XBRL taxonomy contained in this statement: In line with our mission to mainstream ESG reporting, a key aim of the G4 Guidelines is to [...]

The Washington Post reports that The SEC approved rules Wednesday that could make it highly lucrative for Wall Street whistleblowers and other corporate insiders to alert the agency to securities violations. Which is great news in terms of adding another important dimension to corporate transparency – but clearly a touchy subject for many. Apparently the [...]

If you’re from New York you might well think that the Tunis Consensus is some kind of cool new sandwich. Hey! Luigi…gimmee a Tunis Consensus on rye and hold the paprika. But sorry, it’s not. In fact it’s a document from 2010 about realizing Africa’s own vision for development and part of that vision includes [...]

It’s official. Sustainability reporting works. Or at least according to Harvard Business School it does. HBS have been researching the efficasiousness of the CSR report (always wanted to use that ‘e’ word outside of a Turkish steam bath) and found… the first real evidence that mandatory CSR reporting works, and could give policymakers and companies [...]

We often talk about the promise of the  ‘XBRL data ecosystem’ but most insiders understand that this is far from a reality and in fact XBRL is in as much danger of becoming a series of taxonomy-based data silos as the systems it is being layered onto. That’s why harmonization of data assets is so [...]

Fumiko Satoh of IBM Research in Tokyo has recently published a paper that advocates an XBRL Taxonomy for Estimating the Effects of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on Corporate Financial Positions. As the abstract suggests: …disclosing the emissions data by using XBRL will be very beneficial for the analysis of the financial positions and emissions results of these companies. Interested third parties will want [...]

I enjoyed skimming Tim O’Reilly’s presentation from TED 2011 Towards a Global Brain. It has some good dare to share quotes in it like this one from Peter Norvig, Chief Scientist at Google: We don’t have better algorithms. We just have more data. As XBRL is just one of many bricks in the wall of [...]

Microsoft has launched a new add-in for Excel called Fuzzy Lookup that is supposed to help you with the problem of identifying and matching textually similar string data in Excel (e.g. when importing data). Oddly enough this relates to the ‘data scrubber’ point I made in my last post, although Microsoft rather primly refer to the [...]

A new McKinsey report Big data: The next frontier for innovation, competition and productivity is worth a skim. McKinsey thinks we are at a tipping point with big data and that there are many ways of leveraging the availability of big data to create value, for example: Creating transparency – Simply making big data more [...]

Nike just won best sustainability report in the Ceres-ACCA (Association of Chartered Certified Accountants) North American Awards for Sustainability Reporting. But as Paul Baier at GreenBiz points out (with a few spelling errors): When reading traditional annual reports, financial analysis (sic) quickly skim pass (sic) the glossy pictures, platitudes, CEO letter and other marketing fluff and [...]

About a month ago Maryland Association of CPAs blog CPA Success reported an interview with XBRL Intl. vice-chair Conor O’Kelly who had this to say about whether XBRL would be perceived as a burden or an opportunity for CPAs: I think CPAs are going to be spending less time on low-value, manual process debts and [...]

When I came across Carol Sanford’s pentad, a framework for responsible business – in her book The Responsible Business – I was reminded that transparency is a multi dimensional concept. Carol’s pentad looks like this: It struck me that XBRL is really only addressing one arm (or is it ‘glitter’ on a star?) of the ‘quintuple [...]

As I look for examples of Dare to Share in action, I’m coming across various sites that you may or may not have heard of that are espousing the principles of ‘open accountability’ – so here’s a quick summary… OpenlyLocal is a site that lists UK local government sites that are making their data openly [...]

I started looking for other ‘Dare to Shares’ via Google, as you do when you are under the misguided illusion that you thought of it, when I came across this Dare to Share infographic on the Future of Work blog. The graphic includes a quote from Charles Darwin: In the long history of humankind (and animal [...]

Reading Gary Thompson’s very interesting post from last year (?) on Cloud Dimensions: Who, What, When & Where got me thinking about XBRL GL again in terms of my upcoming ‘Dare to Share’ presentation in Brussels. Perhaps the inventors of XBRL GL were not ambitious enough in their thinking of the role that something like [...]

Sometimes you read one of these analyst reports and you wonder what it all means. For example, take the (sponsored) report by Aberdeen Group Enabling Compliance and Business Improvements Through XBRL. Aberdeen has a useful best in class, average and laggard model for assessing some of their report topics. So on page 15 it was [...]

It’s alway good to see another article extolling the virtues of XBRL – like Brad Monterio’s 10 XBRL Myths Exploded – but it’s also important to keep a sense of perspective. XBRL does have considerable promise for many of the benefits that Brad mentions but it’s taken a long while to get to this point [...]

Thanks to Anne Leslie-Binni’s Colorful Gadget Highlights XBRL’s Potential I think I have figured out a way to payoff the national debt. This new visualization of XBRL data from XBRL US shows that there was some $25 trillion (or is $25,736,711,207,100 a gazillion? – numbers never were my strong point) in corporate assets in 2008. [...]

For a state of the art review of submitting XBRL filings to the S.E.C. there’s probably no more comprehensive place to start than Charles Hoffman’s Understanding SEC XBRL Filings, which crams some 10,000 hours of expertise into around 100 pages. Both broad and deep, this a document for dedicated XBRLrs only. Good to see business rules [...]

In Dare to Share 3 I referred to the paper by Garcia and Gil about linking XBRL data to the semantic web. Roberto Garcia has another paper covering very similar ground called Triplificating and Linking XBRL Financial Data. Here I just want to comment on some stats from their efforts. However,  just in case anyone [...]

I thought it was about time to catch up on what’s happening with Integrated Reporting (IR) so it was good to see the initiative now has its own website and roadmap. The Federation of European Accountants has already published a factsheet on IR and the ACCA’s Accountancy Futures provides a useful overview of IR – [...]

In case you are interested – or curious because you are involved with a ‘Controlled Foreign Company’ – the UK’s HMRC have produced a summary of when, how and what to tag if you are submitting accounts to HMRC in the UK. It all sounds so easy. I don’t know what all the fuss was [...]

Readers of this blog will know that I’m always harping on about the relative lack of support for XBRL in ERP systems – preventing ‘flow-through’ of XBRL tagged transactional data that would avoid most of the need for cumbersome ‘after-the-fact’ tagging. So it’s good to see that the momentum for XBRL support in ERP systems [...]

In this third Dare to Share post I want to share some more insight I gained from the online book Linking Enterprise Data, edited by David Wood – specifically from the chapter Linking XBRL Financial Data by Garcia and Gil who usefully propose that: Consequently, our opinion is that the best short term approach in order [...]

I wasn’t very familiar with the Linked Data Initiative (LDI) until I came across this online book Linking Enterprise Data, edited by David Wood. As Bernadette Hyland says on p.57 : The basic assumption of Linked Data is that the usefulness and value of data increases the more readily it can be accessed and recombined with [...]

On behalf of Rivet, I’m scheduled to be presenting at May XBRL International conference in Brussels on the topic of Dare to Share. Having come up with the idea for this presentation I now have to do the hard work – creating the content. So it was with a sigh of relief that I read [...]

In the Trigger Effect over on IT BusinessEdge, Michael Vizard reports that: James Fisher, SAP vice president of marketing for enterprise performance management and finance solutions, says companies would do well to look beyond simply checking off another compliance box when it comes to XBRL. Once in place, Fisher says XBRL will provide a foundation [...]

The news that B Corp is revving up its sustainability rating system provides another perfect use case for a new XBRL taxonomy to help with sustainability reporting. As GreenBiz reports: “This is B Lab’s effort to launch a rating system that focuses not on the financial performance of companies and funds, but instead, their social [...]

If you are following the debate about so-called ‘integrated’ reporting, you might want to take a look at the Framework for Integrated Reporting discussion paper that was recently published by the Integrated Reporting Committee (IRC) of South Africa. As the paper points out: …the overarching objective of integrated reporting is to enable stakeholders to assess the [...]

There have been a couple of related items posted recently that I’d like to briefly respond to. The first is a blog post by Mike Willis on The New Math for Transparency and the second is the tweeted assertion by Daniel Roberts that Until the SEC (and others) can clearly show the value of #XBRL Detailed [...]

The Booz & Co perspective paper The Rise of Generation C is well worth a skim to consider its implications for financial reporting and financial information transparency generally. Just what will it mean to the management and communication of financial content when the next generation of financial information consumers are ‘on the grid 24/7′ and ‘social [...]

Remember the movie The Graduate? I want to say one word to you. Just one word. Yes, sir. Are you listening? Yes, I am. Mashups. Just how do you mean that, sir? Actually Mr. McGuire said ‘plastics’ but my point is that ‘mashups’ was the word that came to mind as I read the Financial [...]

In the MITSloan Management Review report – Sustainability: The Embracers Sieze Advantage – the authors claim that: …the new era of accountability means measurement and reporting of companies’ environmental and social impact will take on greater prominence. So in the sustainability reporting ‘E’ Quadrant where exactly is your business? The 4 Es of sustainability reporting [...]

Private Market Networks (PMNs), as discussed in the Strategy & Business article The New Financial Matchmakers, look like a perfect use case for the use of an XBRL taxonomy as a foundation for the data provided to an exchange by buyers and sellers. Check the author’s conclusion: If government officials around the world allow this [...]

I’m glad to see the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) is starting to invest in evangelizing its sustainability reporting framework in the USA with their Focal Point USA initiative. Apparently on Jan. 31 in New York (well-known home of sustainability reporting): ‘Movers, shakers and report makers’ will gather at the New York Stock Exchange for a breakfast [...]

Here at Rivet we specialize in Financial Content Management (FCM). FCM encompasses financial reporting and consolidations (supporting the internal close), submission of XBRL filings (supporting the external close) and new ways of peer group benchmarking (leveraging publicly available XBRL data feeds e.g. from the S.E.C.). However in most organizations, FCM is not an holistic task [...]

There’s a word in Danish – hvadfornoget – which roughly means ‘What’s that all about?’. Then there’s a word I often use that my Biology master (in 1968) – a veteran of the World War One trenches no less – used to say whenever there was some kind of disturbance in the classroom: Whatthewhobeganit! Which [...]

I wonder how chairman of the S.E.C., Mary Schapiro, feels about being sandwiched between the UK’s chancellor of the exchequer George Osborne (saviour of our economy – or Rasputin depending on your viewpoint) and the governor of the Bank of England Mervyn King (a man with only one thing on his mind – i.e. auditing). [...]

No – not a band (you’re thinking of Atomic Rooster) – but a way of describing the smallest amount of meaningful data that an information container contains. A recent missive from our esteemed Chairman has prompted me to blog about what atomic data means in an XBRL context. It turns out that  ‘Atomicity’ is quite important [...]

Traditional ‘internal close’ financial reporting is chart-based whereas new XBRL ‘external close’ reporting is tag-based. But there’s no need to use separate tools to do what appear to be different jobs – even if they are managed by different teams within your organization. Why not just use one application and one data and document repository [...]

InvestorScopes is a great site for searching S.E.C filings for keywords and generating charts that trend those keywords over time.  Once they combine this with data extracted from Twitter and the blogosphere they will have a very rich content solution for tracking and contextualising interesting stuff that is emerging from the S.E.C. filing ecosystem. When [...]

The U.K’s Financial Reporting Council (FRC) appears to have survived the bonfire of the quangos (US translation: withdrawal of federal funding) and has even released a new report of its own. Yet the flames still beckon because from an innovation perspective, Effective Company Stewardship: Enhancing Corporate Reporting and Audit could be considered a little like Macbeth’s [...]

While  revisiting the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform report entitled The S.E.C. Designed for Failure (from May 2010), I was reminded of when I sold my first accounting software back in 1982 – almost 30 years ago. Apart from the FUD surrounding what was then considered new-fangled ‘electronic’ accounting, my [...]

The CIO Insight Research report on Emergent Technologies for 2011 groups XBRL with 3 other other synergistic software technologies: the Semantic Web, Predictive Analytics and Pattern Recognition.  While Gartner identifies pattern-based strategy as one its 4 converging trends that will change the face of IT and business. XBRL has long been associated with the growth [...]

BASDA’s  Green XML is an interesting initiative from the UK-based Business Application Software Developers Association that claims to represent some 200 software vendors. BASDA has been promoting its e-business XML schema for a decade or so to facilitate the exchange of B2B transactions such as purchase orders and invoices between accounting/ERP applications. They now propose [...]

SAP’s further investment in XBRL technology indicates that the leading ERP vendors are well-aware of a new way of expanding their organizational footprint by going after what SAP calls a complete end-to-end financial close solution. But what exactly does ‘end-to-end closing’ mean? First, you will be aware that there are two financial ‘closes’ for many [...]

Understanding the difference between data-centric and document-centric information management in the context of XBRL is key to grasping its utility. As Gary Thompson says in a recent blog post : A financial report or an electronic health record are not data sources but are instead presentation layers by which data is consumed. There are in [...]

Remember that scene in The Deerhunter when Michael holds up a rifle bullet and says: This is this… One of the points he is making is that sometimes there’s just one small thing that makes a difference, a big difference. That single round makes a big difference to the deer, the Russian roulette player, the [...]

Daniel Robert’s recent post Third Tier Filer Options – XBRL does a good job of outlining the three approaches to XBRL filing that face ‘third tier’ or ‘wave three’ filers in the USA. If you read this blog you’ll know that Rivet already occupies a leadership position as a service provider for delivering XBRL filings [...]

The Nov 2010 KPMG article Challenges Continue with XBRL Compliance, makes the following statements: While management may outsource some aspects of the XBRL-tagged financial information preparation, it still retains ultimate responsibility. and… New analytical tools may assist with management’s review of the XBRL-tagged financial information. These statements highlight the importance of both the pre-filing ‘review [...]

Harvard Business School has just published what must be considered the ‘bible’ of so-called Integrated Reporting (i.e. reports that combine financial and non-financial data) entitled The Landscape of Integrated Reporting: Reflections and Next Steps. Among over 300 pages of cracking content (US translation: awesome content), the ebook has a section on leveraging technology and a couple [...]

Here in the UK, all central government bodies that produce Annual Reports and Accounts in accordance with HM Treasury’s Government Financial Reporting Manual (FReM) are required to include a section in their Annual Report covering their performance on sustainability from 2011-2012. This year, 2010-2011, is termed the ‘dry-run’ year  - a bit like when the S.E.C. [...]

XBRL Planet’s list (or map) of XBRL Projects around the world is impressive. It highlights the fact that XBRL really is an international language for contextualizing data and succeeding where efforts like Esperanto failed. After all, how many people have a copy of Universala Vortaro, the Esperanto dictionary on their bookshelf or would recognize this [...]

One of the takeways from the recent XBRL conference in Philadelphia was expressed by Paul Penler, an executive director at Ernst & Young (as reported in Compliance Week): As time progresses, companies need to beef up their review processes and put more resources in place. Penler’s comment is based on the likelihood that XBRL regulatory [...]

The 2010 XBRL US National Conference is now underway in Philadelphia with the theme: The Path to Transparency. So it seems a good time to pose the question of whether the path to transparency is a Macbethian  ‘primrose way to the everlasting bonfire’  or a Stallonian ‘rocky road to righteousness’? Chuck Callan (Conference Advisory Committee [...]

According to The Daily Telegraph, the UK’s Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) that came into operation in April of this year has now morphed into – you guessed it – a stealth tax on carbon emissions. The complex league table of carbon emitting leaders and laggers with bonuses and penalties has been swept away in favour [...]

Microsoft announced a new process for the way it communicates investor relations (IR) information that essentially bypasses the newswires and minimizes the gap between filing its 10-K, 10-Q and 8-K with the S.E.C. and communicating this information to its stakeholders. XBRL continues to have an important role to play in closing this gap and in [...]

Apparently UK-GAAP is dead – according to IASB Chairman Sir David Tweedie – as UK SMEs prepare to adopt FRSME, the IASB’s International Financial Reporting Standard for Smaller Medium Entities (IFRS for SMES).  As opposed to FRSBE, which is the acronym for any financial reporting standard that gets flung around but never held onto long enough [...]

I’m becoming more and more convinced that the next big thing in corporate reporting is corporate transparency reporting (CTR) based on what you might call ‘intentional transparency’. So what exactly is CTR all about? To start with, CTR is not just about sustainability/CSR reporting. Sure, CSR reporting is a big and important part of CTR [...]

Eric Cohen and his co-conspirators have been manfully evangelizing the XBRL GL (Global Ledger not General Ledger) taxonomy for some years now and Eric’s recent tweet “Are you GL-In?” reminded me that despite being a great concept, XBRL GL still hasn’t taken off yet. So why is that? Well, despite XBRL GL being something that [...]

As the drive for sustainability reporting gains momentum we should remain mindful of the fact that we have a green-field opportunity to do this right by basing this reporting going forward on a data standard like XBRL. This is not a new idea. As I research sustainability reporting and XBRL, I’ve come across papers and [...]

I enjoyed reading Brad Monterio’s two articles in Strategic Finance on Sustainability Reporting and XBRL and noted that the Gaffers at the IIRC have come up with a new acronym: GAFIR – a Generally Accepted Framework for Integrated Reporting. According to Brad’s article, we might have a GAFIR by 2020, but then again we might [...]

I was scouring Twitter today for some interesting XBRL news when I came across this in a Tweet: XPRL is XML for Business and Financial… XPRL? At first I thought it was simple typo but then I discovered that XPRL actually exists – it stands for XML Public Relations Language. So that got me to [...]

A new Deloitte survey report – Sustainability in Industry Today: A Cross Industry View – has a number of interesting findings and starts off well, with a focus on Closing the gap between aspiration and action: …our survey also suggests that many companies have a clear gap between their leaders’ aspirations with regard to sustainability and the [...]

As Google joins Bing and others in upping the capability of its real-time searching – to provide better insight into trending stories on Facebook, Twitter etc. – I wonder whether now is the time for the S.E.C. to add a Twitter feed to its existing RSS feed. Or maybe there is one and I just [...]

In his WSJ article  -  The Case Against Corporate Social Responsibility -  author Dr. Karnani of the University of Michigan’s Stephen M. Ross School of Business essentially comes to this conclusion: The ultimate solution is government regulation…because…Still, with all their faults, governments are a far more effective protector of the public good than any campaign for [...]

Far be it for me to mock efforts to generate XBRL innovation but even I was surprised by the breathless intensity of the Brix Project – a new iPhone app for delivering ‘aha’ moments from XBRL filing data by literally delivering it into your hands. I can see it now. A killer chat up line. [...]

Watching ‘Mary Poppins’ and the delectable Julie Andrews administering that spoonful of sugar somehow reminded me of the S.E.C. and of one of the future directions in corporate reporting – namely RaaS or Reporting as a Service. And before you switch off, I don’t mean delivering reporting functionality as an online SaaS application – we [...]

We’ve been taking a look at the latest data from the XBRL Cloud that summarizes various stats on XBRL filings made to the S.E.C. during 2009 and 2010 (to date). And whatever way you look at it, Rivet is doing well in terms of providing XBRL 10-Q and 10-K filing services. But the real question [...]

H.R. 6038 or The Financial Transparency Act of 2010 was proposed by House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Ranking Member Darrell Issa (R-CA) on July 30th. It’s a bill that deserves the support of anyone who believes that greater transparency of financial information is one way of helping to prevent the financial failures of the [...]

Documents are so flexible aren’t they? You can mix text and numbers, tables and charts – all within the same page context. You can even spend lots of time making a page look aesthetically pleasing and make the information enticing. To an individual human reader, a single well-designed page can communicate a lot of information [...]

As I gradually become more aware of all the various sets of sustainability reporting indicators out there, I wonder if there isn’t a little confusion as to what an ‘indicator’ or ‘metric’ actually is in a sustainability context. Are we in fact talking about indicators when we mean evidence? I come from a financial reporting [...]

Over at framework:cr, CEO Kathee Rebernak’s bio includes this snippet: everything is connected (silos are for grain storage) I agree with Kathee. And much of the talk about ‘integrating’ financial and sustainability data is basically about helping to put two silos side by side rather than creating new kinds of reporting contexts to enable a more [...]

Supply chain auditing for sustainability is catching on quickly amongst many of the world’s largest supply chain orchestrators. And for good reason. So it was only a matter of time before someone got to grips with defining a comprehensive set of reporting indicators for standardizing this activity. That somebody is the Eco Index. The Eco [...]

I’ve been spending some time recently doing a little analysis of online GRI reporting, which has involved looking at their indicator sets and how these are reported by organizations. This led me to BP and MM12 and the need to re-emphasize that for reporting to work you have to report… This is what BP says about [...]

It doesn’t roll off the tongue quite like WYSIWYG but Why-yah-zee-way is just as important a concept in relation to the three levels of information assurance. As information consumers, you all want to be reasonably certain that What-You-Are-Seeing-Is-What-You-Expect and that depends on 3 levels of information assurance: 1: Presentation-level assurance If it looks like a [...]

SmartPlanet did an article on SAP’s sustainability-related acquisitions back in April and in it, AMR Research analyst Steven Stokes was quoted as saying: But what’s most frightening, Stokes said, is that many companies’ solution for sustainability is powered by a rather unsophisticated tool: Microsoft Excel. “Just 7 percent of Fortune 1000 companies say they’re reporting [...]

In the article Financial reporting: rise of the machines (targeted at fund managers and written by a software company guy but worth a look nevertheless), the point is made that: The key to back-office control lies in streamlining and automating data management and report generation – from the collection of data, the creation of reports, [...]

In an effort to try to provide better transparency into the various terms describing ‘new’ kinds of corporate reporting, I’ll explain the differences between integrated, connected and holistic reporting. This is a rather long post so I suggest a shot of Red Bull, Maté, snuff or some other stimulant before you start. Let’s use a [...]

The widely anticipated International Integrated Reporting Committee (IIRC) has now been formed. The strange thing is that both the steering committee and working group seem to have no XBRL representation and virtually zero software company representation – only Microsoft – and they have only been in the business accounting and management reporting business for a [...]

As readers of this blog will know, our financial reporting mantra here at Rivet is Comply. Control. Communicate. Now we have a new mantra for holistic reporting: Collect. Connect. Communicate. The collect and communicate bits are relatively straightforward but it’s the ‘connect’ that is a challenge. As Bob Eccles says in his post It’s Time to [...]

A new consultation paper from the Committee of European Securities Regulators (CESR) could end up having a significant impact on both the adoption of XBRL across Europe and the expansion of the global XBRL standards-based financial information ecosystem.The paper discusses the development of pan-European access to financial information disclosed by listed companies based on two [...]

At last the USA has begun to engage with the thorny issue of sustainability KPIs in an important new report - From Transparency to Performance – sponsored by Harvard’s Hauser Center and the Initiative for Responsible Investment. Is this a shot across the bows of the clever clogs at the GRI or a Harvard push to [...]

A recent Deloitte paper Sustainability in business: a cross industry view has lots of interesting things to say about sustainability in business generally and a few interesting things to say about sustainability reporting specifically. On page 17, the authors comment on sustainability and the future: We believe that the evolution of technology around sustainability measurement, management, [...]

Back in 2004, the UK’s ICAEW issued a interesting report called Digital reporting: a progress report. In the report they refer to the challenge for XBRL of tagging narrative information. So I’d like to noodle that for a moment. In addition, the extension of narrative business reporting into areas where the information to be reported is [...]

Some time back I posted on the use of new platforms (e.g. iPad, iPhone) for delivering corporate reporting so it’s good to see that someone else is picking up this theme. In Is the iPad the future of corporate reporting, Richard Simpson, a bizdev director at a UK-based design agency, has this to say about XBRL [...]

No. Not a new XBRL taxonomy for mailing labels but the title of a very useful white paper by Ernst & Young that provides good introductory coverage of XBRL, the use of XBRL by regulators generally and the S.E.C. specifically, and the connection between XBRL and IFRS.  Worth a read.

Our data maven Ted Stavropoulos alerted me to Microsoft’s new ‘codename Dallas‘ initiative. And no, it’s not an attempt to bring back JR, Sue Ellen and all the other cheeseballs from Southfork ranch. It’s something even better than that – an appstore for data. Dallas is a site for subscribing to and reporting from various [...]

Integrated Reports Voluntary Filing, by authors Eccles and King, is a very useful update on the global integrated reporting situation and outlines four challenges to the 2020 Goal for Integrated Reporting. I’d like to comment on these challenges below. 1. Standards for nonfinancial information need to be established The GRI (and others e.g. Sigma) have [...]

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. We regard the XBRL journey as having three stages: Comply, Control, and Communicate. If you [...]

The future of reporting is holistic reporting. That means reports used to communicate organizational transparency. But don’t expect these reports to be ‘pushed’ out of organizations. Instead they are more likely to be ‘pulled’ together in an automated way by web apps that leverage the combination of XBRL, ontologies and various online data streams. In [...]

The UK PWC Corporate Reporting blog recently posted the following: PricewaterhouseCoopers in partnership with the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants and Tomorrow’s Company is pleased to announce the commencement of a programme looking at what changes are needed to make corporate reporting fit for purpose for the future. This programme is being kicked off with [...]

We’re glad to see that Europe is adopting a Retail Environment Sustainability Code and especially that one of the six ‘commitments’ is reporting… Signatories agree to report on the progress as regards this code through their existing procedures, for instance through their annual CSR or other reports. It all sounds great but without some kind of [...]

You’ll have to wait until Sunday to see if Spain can win the ‘real’ World Cup but in the meantime, they have definitely won the world cup in sustainability scorecards. Thanks to my pal Alejandro at the Spanish AECA, I have now been alerted to the availability of Spain’s online sustainability scorecards (driven by XBRL) [...]

The SEC Data guy recently referred to the fact that some 500 companies have added 13,000 extension tags to the US-GAAP taxonomy as an example of crowdsourcing. But what we really need to reduce the number of extension tags being created is somewhere to do some ‘crowdsuggesting’. What I mean is that if there was [...]

Conor O’Kelly alerted me to this document Creating an Interactive Single Audit Database, which is well worth a read if you get your kicks from auditing…and let’s face it who doesn’t? But the bit I want to focus on is this section, The Real Power of XBRL: The Agreemeent to Agree. Here’s what it says: [...]

When I was speaking at the GRI conference in Amsterdam recently, I chatted with a Director from a leading multinational NGO about the fact that it’s great that the GRI has released a set of sustainability reporting indicators for NGOs but that collecting the data in order to report it could be a nightmare. So [...]

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 [...]

I have a simple and I think brutally effective suggestion for regulators around the world to effect a step change in sustainability reporting. The kind of change that, at a stroke, will make sustainability efforts central to any conversation about company performance, raise sustainability transparency globally and force all businesses to seriously engage with sustainable [...]

According to nextGov Senators inexplicably killed a data transparency amendment proposed for the financial overhaul bill, prompting the head of the House Financial Services Committee to vow to quickly bring the item before the full House for a separate vote. Just what is it about transparency that people don’t like? I can understand that transparency at [...]

Those of us who have been around the business intelligence (BI) space for a while will be familiar with the old mantra – ‘one version of the truth’. What this primarily refers to is the problem of data consistency when storing data in the mess of separate spreadsheet files used for managing analysis and reporting [...]

Our VP of Business Technology, Emily Huang, asked me to write something about the XBRL-Enabled World. So I thought I could go one better and try to visualize it. My first (starter) attempt at doing this can be found here. I’ll add more content and functions over the next month. Thanks to Conor O’Kelly for [...]

Bob Schneider over at Hitachi has posted a useful article on the corporate actions taxonomy being worked on by the DTCC, SWIFT and XBRL US that references their interesting and thorough document - A Business Case to Improve Corporate Actions Communications. But when I read the post and the document it just makes me wonder – why [...]

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, [...]

Reading an old Business Finance article I wrote over a decade ago called Portal to the Future got me thinking that maybe the future of ‘integrated’ or ‘connected’ reporting is not about reports at all but about ‘mashboards’. I wish I’d coined that term but I didn’t. Mashboards are the portals of today, dashboards that [...]

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 [...]

As an an addendum to my recent post that defines XBRL as a data platform, I’d like to make that proposition even clearer with the help of a simple diagram to illustrate the components that make up this platform in the context of U.S. S.E.C. filings. 1. Data Providers – In this case US corporates [...]

I should have thought of this before but developing taxonomies doesn’t have to take years and involve international committees. Anyone can do it. So let’s develop a World Cup taxonomy. For example… Key fact is ‘goal’ and elements are: match e.g. England vs. USA scorer e.g. Gerrard team e.g. England What else can we add? [...]

It’s June 30th 2010. Never mind the Copa del Mundo. Today Spain scored a big goal for XBRL with the launch of their Social Responsibility Scorecard. ( GOOOAAALLL!!! – imagine some nutcase running around a pitch with their soccer shirt over their head showing off a chest tattoo that says: I love you Mum…) Or [...]

I don’t often go off on a bender on this blog – I reserve that for my Friday night curry and cider binge. But here I’m going to noodle a bit about XBRL as a platform. For those of you who are already lost (e.g. Fashionistas – But, like, how can XBRL be on the [...]

Professor Graham Hubbard of the University of Adelaide has written a useful paper called Unsustainable Reporting that makes a number of interesting recommendations including: Sustainability reporting must be integrated with the financials.  If this means significant financials need to be ‘double reported’, so be it.  Clearly a smarter way is to integrate current financial reporting with the [...]

Guess what? Caja Navarra es la primera compañía del mundo que ha elaborado el Informe de Responsabilidad Social en formato XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language). Kudos to Spain’s Bank of Navarra. The first company in the world to create its sustainability report in XBRL format using the new Spanish cci-rsc taxonomy. What is the Spanish cci-rsc taxonomy? [...]

I’m going to finish up my coverage of the recent Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) conference in Amsterdam with what I guess is a kind of manifesto. I’ll call it the Sustainability Reporting Manifesto. I hope that for every reader who finds it all rather hokey, there will be another who finds it at least a [...]

The International Journal of Digital Accounting Research recently published an interesting paper called Visualizing Basic Accounting Flows:Does XBRL+Model+Animation=Understanding by four authors from the Oregon State University. They propose an online Accounting Flow Visualizer (AFV) that consumes XBRL data from S.E.C. filings to present a new kind of visualization of a corporate filer’s financial position. While [...]

Back in July 2009, Ernst and Young UK put out a useful paper called Top 10 XBRL readiness challenges, which I’d like to revisit for a moment. Number 9 in their list was ‘Visualizing the data’. But on closer inspection what they were specifically referring to was presenting the data in a document-centric format and [...]

My colleague Ted Stavropolous over at The Daily Extension is doing a great job focusing attention on what the availability of (eventually) millions of datapoints gathered from XBRL eventstreams (e.g. S.E.C. filing events) will mean in terms of providing a foundation for new financial information and greater transparency. While it’s grand to have all this [...]

Imagine you wanted to find something out like  - who are the top paid Government officials – how would you go about it? You might think that you’d have to do a lot of fruitless searching or submit a freedom of information request or maybe pay some specialist data aggregator to buy their expensively researched [...]

It may have slipped your notice, but recently the UK Government put a system online that provides direct access to all kinds of data that the Government collects and publishes. It’s called the Combined Online Information System (COINS) or as the UK Guardian puts it The ultimate public spending database from the UK government. But [...]

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 [...]

I just came across this French site that is focused on tracking Directors Remuneration paid to executives in top French companies. Now I’m not certain if the data for this site is coming from an XBRL source but it looks like they are offering the ability to export it as an XBRL instance document, which [...]

Yes. I know it’s been a long wait and it’s hardly as compelling as the Hitler Downfall spoofs. But you can now view the GRI Conference panel session on Sustainability Reporting and XBRL Applications, which is rapidly climbing the conference’s most viewed charts on YouTube. Luckily my slot is in Part 1 of the video [...]

As countries like South Africa mandate ‘integrated’ reporting and more cities like Amsterdam promise to issue their own ‘integrated’ city report I’m wondering about the use of the term ‘integrated’ vs. ‘connected’ in a sustainability reporting context. I’m pretty new to this game but I first came across the term integrated reporting in 1989 – [...]

One of our panel questions at the recent GRI conference was focused this issue: How do you assure sustainability data to give investors and others more confidence in the provenance of the data? Well the short answer is simple: Use XBRL to prepare it. Each XBRL business fact (that is not some one-off extension) is [...]

While the GRI indicator sets continue to proliferate, the GRI XBRL taxonomy has not yet gained much traction in the sustainability reporting community. This is partly due to the immaturity of the taxonomy. But it’s also due to the fact that the GRI and its stakeholders perhaps do not understand the value it adds to [...]

2010 will see the first convening of the International Connected/Integrated Reporting Committee – expected to be in London in July. The meeting will undoubtedly discuss the committee’s two key proposals: Identify and define the key elements of a connected and integrated reporting model Establish an ‘International Connected Reporting Committee’ for governance oversight of (1) But [...]

One of the techniques of screenwriting (disclosure: wannabee screenwriter talking) involves thinking about point-of-view (POV) when writing a scene. For example, this means thinking about whose POV the scene is focused on or how the scene may benefit from switching from one character’s POV to another. Anything that helps to give the scene more clarity [...]

As a follow-up to my previous post on the One Report book I’d like to highlight one of the many useful takeaways from the book, found on page 149. Here the authors address a critical issue for the ‘One Report’ camp, namely ‘quantifying the value’  of CSR. Or as I believe the Founder of Wendys [...]

In their excellent book One Report: Integrated Reporting for Sustainable Strategy, authors Eccles and Krzus make brief references to the use of XBRL. But, IMHO, they minimize the importance that an XBRL taxonomy for sustainability reporting can bring to the table, with statements like (p.70): “It is important to remember to emphasize that XBRL is [...]

I’ve been preparing for my trip to the Global Reporting Initiative’s (GRI) conference in Amsterdam by reading Stephen Batchelor’s book Alone With Others: An Existential Approach to Buddhism. The book has a lot to say that is of relevance to the rising demand  for ‘integrated’ and ‘one report’ corporate reporting. In fact I would go so [...]

The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) recently released its research report into Trends in Sustainability Reporting, which makes interesting reading. In my ignorance, I had not realized that the GRI’s XBRL taxonomy has already had an outing. The Italian Bank, Banca Monte Paschi dei Siena, trialed the GRI’s initial XBRL taxonomy to tag their 2007 sustainability [...]

Daniel Roberts recently posted an article entitled CSR/Sustainability Reporting: 6 recent myths that is well worth a read and up to his usual high standards. As Daniel points out, although there is no XBRL standard taxonomy for sustainability reporting there are some worthy candidates for use as input into such a taxonomy including the Society of Investment [...]

Our esteemed President, Patrick Quinlan, is hoping to be in Amsterdam next week – ash clouds and British Airways unions permitting – to present and participate on a panel at the Global Reporting Initiative’s (GRI) annual conference. We’ve mentioned the GRI and sustainability reporting before on this blog. But it’s clear that 2010 is shaping [...]

The XBRL ‘journey’ of comply, control, communicate has been kind of a mantra here at Rivet for some time. So it’s good to know that others like KPMG are coming around to the same view. A recent article for Finance Director Europe quoted KPMG partner Bivek Sharma as saying: We needed a service offering to help [...]

Only six months ago, in a previous post Forward Planning, I reported that a Grant Thornton survey had found that 52% of public companies had no plans to file in XBRL despite the S.E.C.’s mandate. Now, just six months later, Grant Thornton are reporting on this topic again. This time around, 49% of public companies [...]

Tony Zuck offers an interesting post that compares XBRL to cookie labels and also makes the case for the vision and performance of a company being about more than just the numbers. However there are some other perspectives on this take that call Tony’s logic into question. One being that he could have used our [...]

Where I live, in the UK’s West Country, a silo is somewhere you keep manure. Something smelly that you want to keep isolated from the rest of the farm. It’s not much different in IT data-management. A silo is an isolated datastore and much of the effort of corporate IT departments is focused on getting [...]

The University of Birmingham (UK not Alabama) is offering a self-funded PhD with the research theme: A critical assessment of the the impact of XBRL on corporate reporting. This could be your chance to sponsor your own XBRL PhD assuming you don’t feel that the lack of official funding somehow equates with a lack of [...]

The concept of XML/XBRL tagging has been explained to newcomers in many ways – barcodes for financial data has always been popular – but I must have missed this enlightening description involving items of Liz Hurley’s clothing, offered on the UK ICAEW IT Counts blog by Simon Hurst way back in 2008… Fortunately, the first Austin [...]

Danny Werfel, the Comptroller for the Federal Office of Management and Budget (OMB) makes a good point when he states: “The way I approach it, and have collective agreement among the key leaders among leaders at Treasury, OMB, and other critical parties that are thinking about this, is that XBRL is the second question to ask.” [...]

I had a chuckle when I read a recent Business Finance magazine blog post Can XBRL finally automate finance by Alan Radding. Partly because this was not framed as a question (no ?), which was odd, but mostly because it reminded me of my own article for Business Finance back in November 1999 called XML [...]

Back in December 2009 the the UK-based ACCA conducted some research into XBRL … The purpose of this research was to conduct a questionnaire survey of accountants in UK listed companies (FTSE All Share), external auditors, tax practitioners and representatives of the investment management and analyst communities to investigate their views on how the development [...]

Standard Business Reporting (SBR) comes into effect in Australia from July 2010, but there are some differences in the way that the Australian Government is moving forward with XBRL-based financial reporting compared to both the USA and the UK. The first difference is that it is not being mandated (not yet anyway). In their FAQ, [...]

Many people have highlighted XBRL as a key part of the ‘financial’ semantic web but the fact that this is starting to hit mainstream thought is evidenced from this quote from the introduction to David Siegel’s new book: Pull: The Power of the Semantic Web to Transform your Business – one of the few to approach [...]

Here at Rivet we are always thinking of new ways to better service our customers particularly when they are up against it – frantically tagging their financial statements to comply with S.E.C. deadlines. We know that in situations like this, customers need the fastest possible response from our highly qualified staff of technical wizards and [...]

Financial data democratization is one of the long-touted anticipated benefits of XBRL but is there any evidence that this has any foundation in reality? Well apparently there is. The Hitachi XBRL blog reports that recent research has established a link between the use of XBRL reporting and a reduction in ‘information asymmetry where a select [...]

In these tough economic times, we all want to land a dream job right? So stimulated by the excellent advice in Making Your Mark: 5 Ways to Impress Financial Recruiters I have come up with 5 Ways Not to Impress Financial Recruiters in the same categories to make doubly sure you can’t fail to get [...]

One way to learn more about inline XBRL or iXBRL is to use the recently updated add-on for the Firefox browser to load up an iXBRL file (the kind that is used, for example, in the UK to file HMRC returns). The iXBRL add-on inserts a whole raft of iXBRL rendering and analysis capability, plus [...]

We’re proud to have played a part in the Microfinance Information eXchange’s (MIX) project to embrace XBRL to deliver a better understanding of global microfinancing trends through comparative reporting and benchmarking. The MIX XBRL Case Study provides an interesting walk-thru of both the challenges and benefits of XBRL adoption. In order to minimize some of [...]

A useful quick summary of What you need to know about XBRL from a UK tax filing perspective can be found on AccountingWeb. A key point is that if you are able to submit a ‘Short Company Tax Return’ via the HMRC’s online portal as a PDF file, then all the necessary conversion to XBRL [...]

The Japanese Institute of CPAs has produced a sweet cartoon explaining XBRL for newbies like Mr. Sato. This introduction makes a number of useful points, especially about the differences between HTML (rendering data) and XBRL (contextualizing data) and the potential for XBRL-tagged report data to improve analyst productivity and facilitate the automated auditing of data [...]

This brief lesson in corporate transparency Author’s Choice: Don’t Ignore the Transparency Imperative advocates that transparency is not just about presenting accurate, accessible and comparable information (e.g. using globally adopted standards such as XBRL) it is also about establishing a new level of engagement with the stakeholders of an organization. The example comes from a new [...]

An interesting post at the Accounting Elf discusses how financial statements should be more like blogs. With the rise of social media and the generally higher expectations of information consumers, this is an important topic. Financial reports are after all just a channel of communication between an organization and its stakeholders and there’s certainly a [...]

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. CCM [...]

The XBRL International Standards Board at XBRL.org have recently published an interesting document that calls for input on ways to evolve the XBRL specification over the next decade. They identify 3 key goals: making the standard easier for developers making XBRL information more comparable across taxonomies making XBRL information easier to consume alone or in [...]

I am indebted to Conor O’Kelly for his tweeting about Sage, a leading UK SME ERP vendor, taking XBRL seriously. Sage has established an XBRL microsite to cover all aspects of their engagement with XBRL and provided an ‘everything you need to know’ white paper to outline their thoughts. What’s useful about this paper is that [...]

KPMG have published some useful guidance for UK corporations in a short paper called Demystifying XBRL. Despite starting with the rather odd assertion that XBRL tags work in a similar way to barcodes (er, no), the paper has lots of great advice for prospective UK filers of iXBRL-based Corporation Tax (CT) returns – especially in [...]

The C words – complexity and chaos or clarity and communication are at the root of the Global Accounting Alliance’s (GAA) latest report – Making Financial Reporting Simpler and More Useful (The Way Forward). People seem to think that financial reporting is too complex, there is not enough clarity and that existing standards, as they [...]

There’s a very interesting debate going on over at Daniel Robert’s blog that began by considering the extra effort that will be required for footnote tagging but in the comment thread moved to consideration of the process of S.E.C. XBRL reporting. Here I’d like to draw attention to the focal point of where any process [...]

Back in the 1980′s I remember going to an IBM seminar evangelizing something called EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) a document messaging format designed for system-to-system operation over a VAN (value added network). I must say I always wondered what was the purpose of a network that didn’t add any value but today, despite the Internet [...]

An excellent article in the Journal of Accountancy – Avoiding Common Errors of XBRL Implementation – has some useful best practice advice in the sections entitled ‘Mapping Tips’ and ‘A Strong Process for Preparing XBRL Documents’. Two of the article tips in particular are worth highlighting here: Educate management that ownership of XBRL submissions belongs [...]

As we prepare for the first matches in the annual Six Nations Rugby tournament here in Europe, I am reminded of the fact that the 20th XBRL Conference is in Rome, home of Italy’s Stadio Flaminio, famously used for burning Christians in Nero’s time. This being the case, it will surprise no readers of my [...]

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.The purpose of the guidance is [...]

Bain Capital Venture’s recent $12m investment in EDGAR Online is clear evidence that wary software industry investors are starting to believe in the potential of a global financial ecosystem based on XBRL-tagged data. But I think there’s another reason for this confidence in the future of XBRL. Savvy tech-industry watchers also recognize that the proliferation [...]

Once again, no-one invited me to Davos this year, so I’ve been spending my time noodling about XBRL analytics and in particular the visualization of XBRL data. Which led me to this odd couple: XBRL and Augmented Reality. By the way, I think Walter Matthau is perfect for the part of XBRL. Perhaps you have [...]

I love round-up articles. You know, those pieces so beloved by editors that give a snapshot of a topic from different perspectives. That’s why this one - Regulators are champions of XBRL – fresh and pink in the Financial Times, caught my eye. First there was the old chestnut of XBRL being a solution looking for [...]

When I saw the SEC Climate Portal on a Google search results page, I mistakenly thought this was the US S.E.C.’s rather than the Singapore Environment Council’s climate change portal. But I wonder how long it will be before we do see an S.E.C. climate portal? Given the increasing interest in the potential impact of [...]

In a recent post It is NOT different this time, and XBRL will not avoid the coming crisis, author Daniel Roberts quotes Dennis Santiago, CEO of Institutional Risk Analytics, as saying: “bottom line is that as long as people are allowed to create opacity on purpose in finance these problems will resurface from time to [...]

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 couple of years ago, the chairman of the International Accounting Standards Board, Sir David Tweedie, is reported to have said “the future of financials is non-financials”. But I would like to suggest that in fact, the future of financials is feet. Or at least that’s the way it seems here in the U.K. as we [...]

When I first read the post The Economic and Regulatory Shadow by accounting professor David Albrecht, I thought I was reading a treatment for a movie. Plucky protagonists, the accounting professors, stand up against the evil machinations of their arch-villain antagonists – regulators and the State-DoD-NSA complex. Usually in movies of this type, despite all [...]

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 [...]

If you are a newly hired financial reporting specialist at Megacorp Inc. you might soon feel that you’re on a production line, a constantly cranking supply chain responding to a never ending demand chain. One way to avoid this ‘Model T’ effect is to build  an hour or so into your week/month to apply the [...]

UK Publication Accountancy Age is celebrating its 40th birthday, so it asked the ‘experts’: What will the next 40 years hold for the profession? Ted Awty audit partner, KPMG, offered this: Common reporting internationally will drive consistent global approaches. IT developments are key. We shall see comprehensive embedded audit tools highlighting control compliance and exceptions, [...]

Some very interesting facts can be buried in SEC filing footnotes – like those dug up by Michelle Leder at footnoted.org in her post Voting is now open for the worst footnote of 2009. But did you know that one of the features (ahem) buried in Crossfire is footnote exhumation? Footnote exhumation means surfacing the footnotes [...]

Here at Rivet we understand that in today’s world, business reporting is about more than just the financial numbers. It’s also about at least two other “impact” dimensions: Environmental and Social. So continuing our post-Copenhagen theme, I wanted to update you on the Connected Reporting initiative from Accounting for Sustainability. This is how the Accounting for [...]

Charlie Hoffman’s recent blog post A Contract for Meaning raises the interesting point that One form of writing an information exchange contract is an XBRL taxonomy, which got me thinking about Copenhagen, transparency and the Internet of Things. In Copenhagen, President Obama rightly emphasized the need for effective monitoring systems to ensure transparency in meeting [...]

Daniel Roberts recently posted an interesting blog on XBRL and the case for iXBRL called The Logic and the Logical Cave Wall so I thought I would add a few of my own ‘random comments’ on this topic and take issue with a few statements made – just to stir things up a little…First of all, [...]

As the UK prepares for filing tax returns in iXBRL the press is whipping up a media frenzy about battles between software companies and accountants. They obviously didn’t read my previous post, It’s All About Software. I know the software I use to do my UK tax filings is already testing its iXBRL output capability, [...]

In a recent blog post, Reinventing the Business Intelligence Process, Michael Vizard highlights the importance of adding context to data as it is collected rather than after the fact. And preferably in a reasonably automated way. So it’s easy to forget that this is something that XBRL, and indeed any taxonomy-based data tagging paradigm, can be [...]

The CFA Institute is a global, not-for-profit association of investment professionals that awards the CFA and CIPM designations. The Institute’s Centre for Financial Integrity recently published a survey of members’ views on XBRL, given that  XBRL has the potential to substantially change the way a financial analyst collects and analyses company data.The survey results reflect [...]

The news that the Credit Suisse HOLT service for investment analysis will be using XBRL indicates that financial analyst firms are beginning to see the advantages of having and leveraging standardized, global financial reporting taxonomies. HOLT claims a proprietary database of some 20,000 companies in 64 countries as the basis for its investment analysis service. [...]

You have until November 30th to respond to the Committee of European Securities Regulators’ (CESR) call for evidence on the use of a standard reporting format for financial reporting of issuers having securities admitted to trading on regulated markets. According to the CESR: A standard reporting format for financial reporting would enable automated processing of [...]

The Open Compliance and Ethics Group (OCEG) is focused on the enhancement of corporate cultural integrity via the integration of Governance, Risk Management and Compliance processes. The group publishes many useful resources including the Red and Burgundy books for assessing GRC capability and evaluating GRC processes. So what’s that got to do with XBRL? Turns [...]

Reading Charlie Hoffman’s XBRL Thought Experiment is a useful reminder that all the talk of global reporting transparency, comparability, benchmarking etc. depends on some hard practical realities. In fact, his proposed thought experiment will be horribly familiar to anyone who has been faced with the task of performing a financial consolidation in a globally diversified [...]

In their strategy+business article, A Global Governance Primer, the authors pose four key questions that regulators must address in the forthcoming wave of regulatory reform including What role should regulations play? Pointing to the clear need for global oversight of financial markets, the authors state that: Effective regulation and governance will rest on the regulators’ ability [...]

One of the promises of XBRL is to help improve corporate reporting transparency and make comparing and understanding reports easier. Yet the Financial Reporting Council (FRC) – the UK’s independent regulator responsible for promoting confidence in corporate reporting and governance - has plenty of useful stuff to say on reducing report complexity without even mentioning XBRL. [...]

A surprising finding of a recent national survey of U.S. CFOs and senior comptrollers conducted by Grant Thornton is that 52% of public companies had ‘no plans at this time’ to ‘report using XBRL’ – despite the S.E.C. mandate window for XBRL filing of June 2009 to 2011. One wonders what this means? It’s hardly [...]

FASB’s US GAAP Accounting Standards Codification now includes linking to XBRL elements. As their PDF Notice to Constituents explains: In addition to Codification references and electronic links embedded in XBRL elements in the U.S. Financial Reporting Taxonomy, the FASB includes functionality related to those XBRL elements on the Codification website. The Codification provides a list of all U.S. [...]

It’s good to know that Robert Harris, the newly elected AICPA chairman, gets XBRL. In a recent Journal of Accountancy article (Nov. 2009), Harris was quoted as saying: Once we get XBRL worldwide, it makes it so much easier for data to be interpreted and looked at in an objective way. Harris clearly gets it. [...]

The S.E.C recently updated its staff observations from their initial review of XBRL filings here.The observations address a number of issues relating to the body of filings examined by S.E.C. staff, including: Rendering (visual display of data) Element selection Context references Negative values, negated labels and decimals Element selection attracted a lot of comment. Undoubtedly [...]

The news that XBRL International is surveying to determine the interest in an XBRL Certification Program has prompted me to come up with  a suggested set of ratings based on the well-established US movie ratings system. G – General Audiences: This individual is certified to advise on XBRL taxonomies but unable to recommend extensions. PG [...]

I know. You’d expect us to say that. But why do you care about software when you’re outsourcing your XBRL filing? Producing your SEC XBRL filing submission is nothing like printing and publishing an annual report. Sure, the end result looks much same but the process of getting there is fundamentally different. When you outsource your [...]

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 [...]

Rivet delivers a number of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) financial reporting solutions. SaaS is a great application delivery model offering rapid deployment, predictable cost and virtually unlimited scalability. But SaaS solutions rely on the integrity and security of the application hosting provider, on whose servers the application is run and (usually) your application data is stored. That’s [...]

One of the promises of XBRL is that standardization of reporting elements aids transparency and comparability of financial numbers. However one important area of transparency and comparability, certainly for peer group assessment, is in the area of corporate performance. But we are a long way from standardizing the definition and metrics of corporate performance, as [...]

We’re used to hearing about the bad habits of fashion models but it’s not often that someone goes public about a bad information model, which is what Evan Lenz plans to do at the upcoming XML-in-Practice 2009 conference, in Arlington, VA.Lenz claims that XBRL is a prime example of bad information modeling so it might [...]

There’s been a steady increase in job adverts for reporting analysts and the like that are including the requirement for XBRL expertise. Now I know that writing job specifications is a pain for most people, so I thought I’d help you out. The next time you are writing a job spec for a financial/reporting analyst, [...]

It’s not often that a financial reporting tool can both blow your dress up and knock your socks off, but apparently our Crossfire solution can. Or at least it did for long-time FRx consultant Jan Harrigan CPA, blogging at FRxbuzz.com – a site focused on the popular Microsoft FRx financial report writer. Now I should say [...]

As Eric Cohen rightly pointed out on Twitter, although there’s no mention of XBRL in the press release, the news that the US SEC and the UK FSA have agreed to identify a common, coherent set of data to collect from hedge fund advisers/managers to help the SEC and FSA identify risks to their regulatory objectives and [...]

A very useful analysis of the recent SEC filing round – The results are in on first XBRL filing in Compliance Week includes this quote: Another criticism: the rendering of XBRL-tagged statements—that is, how they appear to investors when viewed in XBRL reader programs, such as the one on the SEC’s Website. “Companies are hung [...]

A very informative blog post A Future Of On-Line Finance – From Brokers To Blogs To Yahoo analyzes the online finance space across three dimensions: Information, analysis and execution. However, nowhere does this post mention XBRL and the disruptive effect it will have on the future of online finance, especially in the area of what the [...]

Much of the promise of XBRL for comparative reporting – especially in a global context – depends on taxonomy standardization across national boundaries. But as this post on standards and standard-setters from AccountingWEB points out, perhaps the focal issue now is less what should be standardized but who will be in charge of the standardization. [...]

It’s pretty easy to understand the first two parts of our new tag line – Comply and Control – but what about Communicate? Financial communication isn’t just about publishing and distributing financial reports like income statements and balance sheets. Consider the combination of Twitter, Investor relations and XBRL. In a recent interview with IR Alert, Michelle [...]

Rivet has a new tagline: Comply. Control. Communicate. The new tagline reflects two key messages: That Compliance is just the start of a journey towards financial transformation of your business and that Rivet’s Crossfire Reporting Platform will support you on every stage of the journey. Here at Rivet we like to think that every CFO [...]

The release of the AICPA’s history of XBRL, The story of our new language, reminded me to lookup an article I wrote almost exactly 10 years ago in Business Finance magazine called XML Means Business, in which I confidently concluded: All kinds of applications that finance managers now rely on will soon use XML to import [...]

According to the UK’s HMRC (Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs) website: From April 2011 under UK Government proposals, all companies, clubs, societies, associations and other unincorporated bodies who are required to make a Company Tax Return will have to: – file their company tax returns online for all returns delivered after 31 March 2011 for [...]

It’s easy to forget that not everyone is completely focused on monetary gain when they invest in a business – an increasing number of individual and institutional “philanthropic” investors also care about the social returns generated by a business. Paul Wilkinson recently blogged about day 3 of the recent XBRL Summit at Santa Clara, CA [...]

The recent XBRL US Pacific Rim Technology Workshop in Santa Clara, CA resulted in some interesting key findings that are worth commenting on while we wait for the official discussion paper to be published. XBRL US, XBRL Japan and the IASB are working together to bring convergence to public company reporting taxonomies for Japan’s EDINET, [...]

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 The XBRL community [...]

Rivet recently released CrossView (read press release) -  a free online tool for finding, viewing and managing SEC XBRL filings that delivers on the promise of interactive data. This post gives you a quick walk-through of the key features using just 3 screenshots from the product. Find CrossView makes it easy to navigate the financial [...]