There’s no replacement for XBRL. But Dr. Graham G. Rong, Fellow at the MIT Sloan School of Management and chair of the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium, thinks there are opportunities for Semantic Web technologies to enhance it, turning the data within financial reports into meaningful knowledge that helps both the producers and consumers of these materials.
A few weeks ago, Haaretz, Israel’s oldest daily newspaper, published an article about the country’s adoption of XBRL with the chilling headline A third of Israeli companies get int’l financial reports wrong. Summarizing the findings of a recently published study by a trio of researchers, the piece states:
WASHINGTON, July 27 /PRNewswire/ — XBRL US, the non-profit consortium for XML business reporting, has released a second version of its XBRL Consistency Suite with improved functionality and additional checks that now cover detailed footnote tagging. The new version also now provides a quick and easy way to compare the 2009 Taxonomy Release to the 2011 Pre-release of the US GAAP Financial Reporting Taxonomy, recently published by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB).
Vinod Kashyap is a Director at NextGen Knowledge Solutions Private Ltd., which is engaged in the business of conducting training courses on XBRL for banks, corporations, and financial professionals in India. He is a member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India and is a qualified Information Systems Auditor.
SEC requirements for XBRL disclosures affect three types of entities: operating companies, mutual funds, and credit rating agencies that are Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organizations (NRSROs).
the impact that creating XBRL exhibits has on traditional financial statements. The process forces (or, more optimistically, enables) accountants to think about their financials and the underlying accounting in fresh and useful ways.
We spoke to Patrick Quinlan (CEO) and Kevin Berens (VP, Products) to get some insights into what is happening in XBRL land.
Ahead of the start of the June 30th filing season, the first that requires Year 2 detail tagging for the largest SEC registrants, the SEC has updated their SEC Viewer (live XBRL filings made to the SEC) and Pre-Viewer (preview XBRL files prior to live filing) with a new XBRL rendering engine. Details of the new release can be found here, but it looks like the new rendering engine addresses the following display issues
Today's means of exchanging financial data have entered a process of global synchronization and standardization. Intuitively, this makes sense given the interconnected and interdependent nature of economic and business entities around the world, coupled with advances in computing power.