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.

Drilldown is a commonplace feature of all accounting/ERP/financial reporting software. The aim is to enable you to get from summary to source i.e. to navigate from information to data or from report summary line to transaction posting line. The problem is that every transaction management software package is different so it’s not easy for any reporting package that sits above these to easily understand how to navigate down to the transaction data source without maintaining multiple ‘mapping layers’ into various ERP systems.

XBRL does a great job of standardizing ‘top-level’ report formats to provide an ideal start-point for a drilldown. But without similar taxonomy based tagging at ledger account and perhaps even transaction level line level, it’s hard to create a ‘universal’ drilldown capability that can facilitate a seamless audit trail. And it’s even harder when the source data systems are not part of an integrated ERP suite but spread all over the place as stand alone modules on an organization’s LAN or WAN.

That’s why it’s a shame that ERP vendors have not embraced XML-based web services as well as they might have. Every module in an ERP system essentially functions as both a data receiver and provider  - that’s why traditional data import and export functions are important core functionality in any ERP system. And enabling data consumption and provision programmatically across the Internet is basically the point of web services.

So one way of providing a seamless audit trail, top-down from an XBRL formatted report, is to be able to call a standardized GL/AR/AP etc. web service (or data interface) and pass XBRL tags as a means of navigating the drilldown hierarchy . Of course this also requires XBRL tagging to move down and become embedded at least at sub-ledger account level. Which is one reason why the first stage of XBRL-enabling ERP systems for seamless drilldown, XBRL-GL, is an important step towards this goal.

ERP vendors seem to be genetically pre-disposed to avoiding any kind of standardization that may reduce their competitive differentiation. But here we are just talking about a very simple, but standardized, ‘GET’ interface available for each ledger that would also facilitate ERP-to-ERP interoperability generally. Unfortunately without this kind of joined-up thinking it’s not just the seamless audit trail that remains pie-in-the-sky, it’s also the promise that XBRL holds for improving the control of internal accounting data and re-architecting the way consolidation reporting software functions.