SANTA CLARA, Calif. – The day 3 agenda of the XBRL Pacific Rim Technology Workshop and Summit was simple – approaches to tagging and “rendering” XBRL, data consistency, putting tagged data into databases, and something about “impact investing.”
But it generated complex questions:
- How can technologists help millions of data users get the different views of the same data they want?
- How can complex businesses reconcile diverse software systems to reduce the burden of preparing financial reports for banks, investors, and regulators?
- What does better data mean to the heretofore binary choice between for-profit and non-profit investing?
From “template-based tagging” to “social return on investment,” day three ran from practical to idealistic. With XBRL’s seemingly contradictory delivery of more structure to accounting and more dynamism to business, the summit’s concluding day – surely by design – left participants with more questions than answers.
Read more here.
News for those of you confused about how to comply with the Securities and Exchange Commission’s new mandate to use XBRL technology in financial reporting: A new supply of confusion has just arrived.
The latest batch of frustration erupted earlier this month, when largest companies in America had to start filing period reports “tagged” in XBRL coding. Those tags come from a taxonomy of accounting terms that neatly matches up the tags to concepts in U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles.
Except, um—GAAP was replaced on July 1 by the new Accounting Standards Codification. The existing XBRL taxonomy doesn’t match up to accounting terms in the Codification, and won’t be accurate for filings that cite Codification. As you can imagine, this discrepancy has left financial reporting executives rather peeved.
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As you may recall, we blogged about a NIRI session we attended “Understanding IR Strategies Behind XBRL – IROs Evolving Role”. In this post we provided a broad overview of why XBRL is relevant to IROs and the requirements for adoption, a broad definition and the implications of using it to help improve processes.
Recently a report was published by The Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants (CICA) targeted to CFO’s entitled “Transition to XBRL”. In spite of this being issued in Canada, the report provides a balanced review of what is required for U.S. companies and foreign private issuers under the SEC’s implementation schedule for XBRL as well as highlighting significant developments in the implementation of XBRL as it pertains to Canadian preparers.
Read more here.
SANTA CLARA, Calif. – Day 2 of the XBRL Pacific Rim Technology Workshop and Summit included calls for business and government to use open business standards to disclose information about spending, pollution, and important business changes.
Representatives from DTCC and SWIFT, the consortia responsible for technology to support securities and cash transactions around the world, spent most of Wednesday morning presenting detailed explanations of the benefits of using technology standards to improve the reporting of “corporate actions.”
Read more here.
It’s midway through earnings season and 61 companies (as of 5 pm today) have produced XBRL statements under the SEC mandate for reporting periods ending after June 15. The rest of the first 500 biggest companies should join the interactive data movement in the coming weeks. According to early indications, all’s well with XBRL.
The bad news is few if any issuer websites are giving shareholders more than a basic view of XBRL statements while some errors may reveal the SEC hasn’t fully scaled up its review process.
Read more here.
