Sage Stuffs XBRL Turkey

February 17th, 2010 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor

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 it clearly lays out the Sage product roadmap for supporting XBRL/iXBRL across their diverse product range. A paragon of clarity and transparency, just like XBRL.

So just in case you are wondering, I’m not suggesting that XBRL is a ‘turkey’ in the US sense of the word – it just makes a great headline. And while you wait for Sage and other ERP vendors to fully embrace XBRL you might like to consider what Rivet’s Crossfire can do to help you to manage your XBRL reporting in the meantime.




The Seamless Audit Trail

January 25th, 2010 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor

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 refinement of a basic function of any accounting or financial reporting software package: Drilldown. Read the rest of this entry »