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 educated (10%), and validation (9%). Now I know this was not part of the survey remit but an aspect of ‘preparedness’ that was not addressed is what businesses are preparing to do when all their peers and competitors are also filing in XBRL?

We understand that the main driver for preparedness today is compliance. But here at Rivet we regard compliance as only the start point of a journey towards the kind of financial transformation that has the potential to change the way businesses are managed. We think that once a significant bulk of corporate financial and operational information is available in XBRL format in the cloud and accessible via web services, new ways of business management will emerge – especially in the areas of corporate performance benchmarking, activity alerting and visualization of first national and then global business trends.

So the other kind of preparedness that businesses might be thinking of includes:

1.         How are we going to take advantage of all this peer group/competitive data?

2.         How are we going to make the feeds into our XBRL regulatory reporting process slicker and easier?

3.         How we are we going to take advantage of XBRL to control our business more effectively?

4.         How are we going to leverage our regulatory XBRL output to communicate better with our     stakeholders?

5.         What new staffing roles and skillsets need to be in place to execute 1-4 above?

Sure. Short-term preparedness is all about compliance and that’s probably burden enough for many businesses right now. But it’s worth keeping in mind that there’s more to preparing for the future potential of XBRL than enabling today’s regulatory reporting. As XBRL edges ever closer to the magical ‘tipping point’ of a relatively homogenous corporate financial data ecosystem in various national jurisdictions, it becomes even more important to balance current ‘compliance’ thinking with future ‘control’ and ‘communication’ thinking.