Peter Boritz is the architect and chief technical officer for Snappy Reports XBRL and can be reached via e-mail.

This is the send installment of a four-part series on filing XBRL statements with the SEC; Part 1 provided an overview of XBRL filing issues. 

US-GAAP includes over 90 detailed reports – not only the basic reports of balance sheet, inme statement, and cash flow, but also a lengthy list of industry-based reports, including both statement reports for financial facts and text-based reports for disclosures. These provide good guidance in properly mpleting your XBRL filing.

But US-GAAP reports serve as starting-point templates only. The SEC does not use these reports. You have to create your own reports within your filing. This leaves you with two choices: (1) start with an existing report and distill it down, or (2) start from the beginning and add the elements you want.

Moreover, your filing must be presentable in the Interactive Financial Report Viewer. This is no small task. The Viewer has limitations that you must ntend with:

1. The Viewer Does Not Process Calculation Linkbases You must map totals to elements whose values would otherwise be calculated. The Viewer will not process calculations or show elements with their calculated values. These must be handled manually.

2. The Viewer Does Not Process Dimensions The technology of XBRL dimensions implements data warehousing ncepts within XBRL. A data warehouse is a database that is designed for query and analysis rather than for transaction processing. A warehouse stores facts of interest and uses lookup tables for quick aess. The Viewer does not display data stored in dimensions. Reports such as the Statement of Shareholders Equity are rich in dimensional categories for facts of interest. The Viewer is unable to display the shareholders equity report or any other report that uses dimensions, if dimensional aspects are used in the instance document.

3. The Viewer Cannot Render plex Reports  It is unable to render the reports provided as part of US-GAAP. These reports are mplex and rich in detail.

The Viewer is able to display only a subset of elements. These include only elements having a mapped value and their immediate parent. Elements that are nested deep within the report hierarchy do not display in proper ntext. For example: the element Cash and Cash Equivalents sits four levels deep within the Statement of Financial Position under the element Restricted Cash. The Viewer will display both these elements, but without groupings for Assets or Current Assets. You will wind up with a balance sheet nsisting of unrelated and out-of-ntext disnnected pieces.

4. The Viewer Does Not Display Footnotes A footnote in this ntext is not a disclosure. It is an everyday footnote similar to what you may see at the bottom of a Word document. A footnote is used to further describe a data fact in the report.

Here’s an example of the usefulness of footnotes. An element ntains a label which provides human readability for spoken languages. There can be only one label for any given language and label category mbination. A problem ours if the label changes from filing to filing. We need a way of keeping both labels. One way of doing this is to have a different extension for each filing. This causes scalability problems and more work. An alternative is not to allow the labels to change from filing to filing. This can be done using footnotes to present variable changes that happen between filings. The labels remain the same, and footnotes are used to present information specific to individual filings.

For example: the label “Property Plant and Equipment of Aumulated Depreciation” is a static label. Typically, however, a label may more likely resemble “Property Plant and Equipment of Aumulated Depreciation of $x and $y”. This label is no longer static, because the values of $x and $y are tied to the filing based on data facts within the filing.

Some software products can cross-reference. This means that the footnote will pull the value of an external element (in this case aumulated depreciation) and place it in the footnote. This would be nice to do for a label. It dynamically changes the value for labels from filing to filing without the necessity of cloning extensions and then modifying labels on a filing by filing basis. The use of dynamic labels solves reusability and scalability issues that would otherwise require that extensions be cloned.

These are four limitations of the Viewer. One piece of good news is that the SEC is less ncerned about how your filing appears in the Viewer and more ncerned about the data in your filing. But the reality is that your clients and peers will look at your filing in the Viewer. The Viewer is the yardstick by which they will measure the quality of your work.