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 looks [...]

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 combination with information [...]

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 to [...]

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 been [...]

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 a [...]

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, running irrespective [...]

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 associated [...]

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 Sustainability [...]

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 global [...]

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. As [...]

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 financial information, [...]

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 out [...]

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 to [...]

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.
In [...]

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 credible [...]

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. Financial Reporting [...]

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 [...]

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 selecting the right element and [...]

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 – Parental [...]

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 XBRL [...]

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 that [...]

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 up [...]

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.
In [...]

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 Savage, [...]

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 or Controller [...]

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 and [...]

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 accounting periods [...]

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 and [...]

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, US [...]

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 is somewhat energized about the [...]

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 ecosystem of [...]