XBRL and ERP

April 21st, 2011 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor

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 is increasing, albeit slowly, as evidenced by this summary page – Leading ERP vendors Making Strategic Moves to Support XBRL and Meet Mandates – provided by the 22nd XBRL International Conference website.


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SAP and XBRL: Slow Draw

March 21st, 2011 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor

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 for a new generation of collaborative financial management applications that will have a profound effect on business.

Well. Better late than never – as I commented on the blog:

Read the rest of this entry »


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End-to-End Closing

December 17th, 2010 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor

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? Read the rest of this entry »


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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.


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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 »


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Posted in Control, XBRL | 4 Comments »