If you’re still bolting on or outsourcing the XBRL rendering of your financial statements, you’re likely missing out on the true benefits of digital business reporting, acrding to Charles Hoffman, widely viewed as the founder of XBRL. He and Raynier van Egmond, are working on a paper to outline their “financial report semantics and dynamics theory,” which they say creates a better path to digital business reporting that goes beyond mpliance with an XBRL reporting requirement.

Hoffman is an acuntant who played a key role in nvincing the American Institute of Certified Public Acuntants to invest in developing XBRL to revolutionize business reporting. He knows the acunting and reporting, and he knows the technology. In some respects that makes him still a bit of a rarity.

There are lots of acuntants out there who are still learning XBRL, and there are lots of XBRL experts who are not acuntants. The theory on the semantics and dynamics of financial reports put forth by Hoffman and van Egmond is meant to try to bridge that gap – to help acuntants see how they can better leverage the technology, while also helping software developers see how they can build more useful tools to make XBRL more relevant to acuntants.

Hoffman and van Egmond write that the central purpose of the paper is to explain that financial reports are based on a defined set of semantics and dynamics and that those semantics and dynamics exist based on a study of XBRL filings with the Securities and Exchange mission to date. Their paper, currently in draft form to llect feedback before it is published, seeks to explain those semantics and dynamics.

Acuntants don’t typically think about the semantics and dynamics of a financial report, so the paper seeks to bring them into focus for acuntants. On the other hand, software developers are not as familiar with the semantics and dynamics of financial reports, so the paper is intended to help those software developers better understand what acuntants are looking for to more easily understand software applications.

The paper says Hoffman and van Egmond based their theory on years of creating and testing XBRL instances and taxonomies to determine how to make XBRL more useful and to give technology experts some tips on creating XBRL technical specifications. “Outlining this information explicitly will allow people less skilled in using XBRL because of less experience making use of XBRL to learn from others,” the authors wrote.

The authors hope the theory will beme a resource for software vendors, acuntants, internal auditors, external auditors, regulators, financial analysts, and other business professionals working with semantic, structured, model-based digital financial reports that leverage the XBRL medium.