Lance Styles's List: XBRL

• Oracle, in fact, recently announced expanded XBRL support

  • Will this facilitate the incorporation of XBRL into ECSS?
• while Oracle announced expanded XBRL support (via a new XBRL Manager component)  in its upcoming Enterprise Performance Management System release
• According to Oracle officials, the new XBRL capability will let customers create  XBRL-tagged financial statements using current definitions of the XBRL  taxonomies

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• Information about Oracle's emerging support for XBRL. - Lance Styles on 2008-01-08

• Most reporting initiatives fail because end users cannot agree on common  definitions.(see endnote 7) In a recent BI maturity assessment at a global HR  management firm, consultants revealed that common definitions weren't so  "common" after all. For example, it was discovered that the definition of "gross  margin" meant something different to the sales and the finance organizations —  which became obvious only when senior executives saw the reports where numbers  did not match.

  • One of XBRL's strengths is that it forces common definitions. XBRL is an enabler of Business Intelligence

• Clearly, XBRL has gone global as it will be used throughout the world. The clear  significance is that this financial and operational information needs to be  understood and used by business professionals, CPAs, financial analysts,  students and anyone with attachment to accounting records and business  operations.
• it is essential that Accountants make the commitment to learning as soon as  possible. For CPAs, it is not just learning how to spell XBRL. It is, of course,  learning about the functions, capabilities and tools surrounding XBRL.

• An article stressing the importance of learning XBRL. It also lays out a basic XBRL learning plan. - Lance Styles on 2008-01-15

• preparers who had participated in the SEC's voluntary XBRL program had indicated  that the initial number of hours for tagging their financial statements ranged  from 80 to 100 hours but dropped significantly for subsequent reports

  • I'd like to know where these numbers come from.

• A very good introduction to the fundamentals of XBRL. - Lance Styles on 2008-01-11

• improve the usability of financial reports, increase data quality, as well as  speed the time to publishing
• Costs associated with the first year of implementation range from $5,000 to  $40,000, he said. He added that XBRL saved companies thousands of "hours."

  • I would like to know where these numbers come from.
• "The real barrier to getting this used is the fact that it is new,"

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• The chairman of the SEC expresses support for XBRL reporting. This is significant for the Air Force because the harder the SEC pushes, the faster software companies will move to incorporate native XBRL support in their applications. - Lance Styles on 2008-01-11

• an article discussing how the Australian government is using XBRL to make its e-business model more agile. - Lance Styles on 2008-01-09

• In the United States, pilot programs in government and regulatory agencies are  showing promise. Awareness of this emerging standard’s potential is increasing  throughout the U.S. federal government as agencies recognize that XBRL offers a  paradigm shift in the supply of financial and regulatory information that can  benefit individual federal agencies as well as the federal government as a  whole.
• With XBRL, federal agencies, trading partners, regulatory bodies, and the public  at large can share and reuse financial data to meet their specific needs without  generating separately formatted reports for each user or purpose.
• With increased emphasis on federal performance management and public  accountability, the demand for useful information for decision-making can only  increase. Federal agencies and regulatory bodies including the FFIEC, SEC and  the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) have had widely publicized  successes with XBRL that will increase its momentum in the next several years.
• The FFIEC predicts a savings of $26 million over 10 years from its initial XBRL  implementation. Beyond cost savings, however, error rates have fallen by 30  percentage points, and analyst productivity has increased by as much as 33  percent. Processing times shortened from weeks to days.

  • This is a powerful selling point. Need to find out where this number came from.
• As the XBRL infrastructure continues to grow, its applicability to federal  financial reporting can provide extremely rich and well understood information  to diverse recipients from trading partners to the Congress to central agencies  such as OMB and Treasury to the public at large.
• Opportunities for the use of XBRL abound—within individual agencies as well as  throughout the federal government as a whole. XBRL could benefit areas from  budget formulation to financial review to trading partner balances.

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• XBRL goes XL—Momentum behind the XBRL reporting language may be greater than  ever this year, with governments, financial authorities, companies and investors  all favoring its adoption.

• Deloitte recognizes XBRL as one of the top 10 emerging trends that will significantly impact the technology sector in 2008. - Lance Styles on 2008-01-24
• Quotes from the report:
  
  -- In 2008 XBRL may become as well known as HTML or GAAP.
  
  -- Momentum behind the XBRL reporting language may be greater than ever this year, with governments, financial authorities, companies and investors all favoring its adoption.
  
  -- XBRL should enable greater transparency. The US SEC directly attributed its discovery of billions of dollars-worth of backdated share options to the conversion of submissions to XBRL.
  
  -- XBRL may lower companies' costs but the bigger benefit may come from creating a more accessible pool of financial data that can be analyzed using standard business intelligence techniques.
  
  -- Governments should ensure they have the right skill sets, or adequate training plans, to enable staff to be able to exploit XBRL's functionality. - Lance Styles on 2008-01-24

• Companies that don't embrace XBRL will sacrifice the ability to leverage  external data and easily calculate growth trends, drivers and metrics and run a  wide range of simulations, including M&A scenario analysis, to help their  organizations improve business performance and optimize the financial forecast  process
• the application to pure financial reporting is only the beginning since XBRL  provides the perfect technological fit to support the growing trend towards more  Enhanced Business Reporting (EBR). EBR includes the reporting of more  non-financial business value drivers and the increased use of narrative in  reporting.

• combined with performance management software, XBRL delivers actionable data  that helps organizations:

   
   
  • Identify internal areas for improvement  
  • Leverage external benchmarking for competitive analysis  
  • Allow for a wide range of simulations, including M&A scenario analysis  
  • Enhance reportable data  
  • Provide unified reporting in a single environment to increase data accuracy  and keep maintenance costs down

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• IT and business executives need to fully understand how various standards for  data exchange in their industry space will implicitly enforce and support  governance initiatives and strategic decision-making.
• The eXtensible Business Reporting Language, better known as XBRL, gives  corporations a leg up on achieving regulatory and compliance objectives by  helping streamline the perpetual communication of their most important business  and financial data.
• XBRL is designed to accommodate the most complex of financial reports
• XBRL is very scalable and can be put to use by all organizations that have  robust financial reporting requirements, regardless of industry
• Both internal and external consumers of corporate financial data - investors,  analysts, customers, regulators, etc. - can now process and account for  financial data in a much more efficient, accurate and optimized manner when it  resides in XBRL format.
• For the foreseeable future, demand will be high for expertise that can capably  integrate these different data communication and transfer standards.
• Executives that focus on governance initiatives should understand what open and  free data exchange standards exist in their industry and how to harness their  innate benefits in order to reduce operational constraints (especially those  associated with data) and better capture and measure company-wide performance.

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• This article highlights the value of free and open data exchange standards like XBRL. - Lance Styles on 2008-01-31

• We advise companies that have not yet begun investigating XBRL and MDM to do so  immediately, and all organizations should begin developing skills in using them.
• XBRL is the clear choice whenever data must be shared outside the organization  and the objective is to eliminate (or severely reduce) the work associated with  bringing in and using the data in a business process.
• XBRL usually is associated with financial data since most of the visible effort  to date has involved tagging publicly traded companies' financial filing  statements and regulatory submissions by financial institutions. However,  XBRL-tagged data could be used in any business process where companies share  information.
• XBRL does not easily lend itself to ensuring duplications are eliminated
• Ventana Research asserts that all companies, particularly Global 2000  corporations, must begin developing XBRL and MDM skills in their finance and IT  organizations. Information management is one of the most pressing issues facing  IT organizations today. Difficulty in maintaining data consistency across and  within business units and organizations drives up costs, delays internal and  external reporting and limits companies in implementing more efficient and  effective business processes.
• We advise companies to begin pilot programs and projects with achievable but  meaningful objects right away.

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• This is an excerpt from a Ventana Research Note. It talks about the relationship between Master Data Management (MDM) and XBRL and how the two should be used in tandem. - Lance Styles on 2008-01-31

• For the most part, data management’s objective is to standardize and reuse  accurate data, focusing on the set of data that is clearly "corporate" in that  it does not change across departments and applications.

  • Standardization and reuse are hallmarks of XBRL.
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  f you thought Lotus 1-2-3 revolutionized spreadsheets, get a good grip  on your mouse because XBRL will do even more for financial reporting and  analysis.
• XBRL reduces inconsistencies—such as ambiguous business terminology and myriad  data formats—that often necessitate manual intervention and slow financial  reporting.
• CPAs are key players in information systems planning and therefore can be  influential proponents of XBRL.

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• the initial uses of XBRL for mandated financial reporting and the accompanying  analysis of those reports represent only the beginning of what the technology  can do.
• Companies don’t even have to change their existing financial applications.  “Virtually everything that needs to be done can be done outside the ERP and GL  systems in middleware,” says Walter Hamscher, vice chair, XBRL International.  And it doesn’t have to be expensive.
• XBRL is independent of any hardware platform, software operating system,  programming language or accounting standard

• Microsoft is another early adopter of XBRL. It publishes its financials in  XBRL, reports Michael Ohata, Microsoft director of business reporting. “XBRL is  the key for driving efficiency in reporting,” he says. Ohato estimates using  XBRL has enabled the company to spend one-fifth the time on financial reporting  it previously required.

   

  Microsoft looks at XBRL to be applied beyond basic financial reporting. “We  see it as part of the trend toward business performance management,” Ohato says.  It will enable companies to expedite the collection and dissemination of  performance data, such as key performance indicators, through a technology  architecture that includes not only XBRL but XML and Web services.

   

  In the long term, the biggest payback from XBRL will likely come from  compliance. “XBRL will definitely help with Sarbanes-Oxley compliance by putting  in a metadata layer for controls and real-time monitoring,” Ohata says. XBRL,  for example, could be used to create what amounts to a real-time auditing system  that automatically collects, analyzes and reports data almost as fast as it  changes.
• The benefits of XBRL are greater speed, reduced work and fewer errors. As a  result, XBRL cuts the time required and lowers the cost of pulling information  from business reports and putting into spreadsheets or other analytical  applications. It also eliminates the need to extract, transform and map business  data to make it readable by other systems.
• In published reports, the FDIC cites a 25-percent reduction in processing costs  due to XBRL.

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• Financial statements can be created in XBRL in several ways. Several XBRL-aware  accounting software products support XBRL as a native import and export format.  These tools allow users to map charts of accounts and other structures to XBRL  tags. XBRL can be created manually or generated from a reporting system. XBRL  can be generated from EDGAR-formatted information using  transforms found on several web sites, allowing users to leverage their EDGAR  generation applications. Or, similarly, other formats can be transformed as a  back-end process. It is likely that a combination of these will be used by  companies wishing to exchange information in XBRL.

• the Federal Housing Agency (FHA), an agency within HUD, used XBRL GL to create  interoperability between disparate legacy financial feeder systems and the  department’s ledgers and control systems.
• XBRL was used to standardize collecting, obligating, and disbursing data coming  from the various financial feeder systems. Data were filtered or summarized  based on the system they were feeding, and then sent to other systems.  Performing full audits is relatively easy now because the audit trail for the  detail is linked to the data through tags.
• With a more reliable, accurate, and consistent crosswalk, the FHA improved cash  management by eliminating posting errors and the subsequent rework or  complicated after-the-fact adjustments. Reconciliations are done on the spot.  Month-end and year-end closing of the books takes days not weeks. And  post-closing adjustments or other rework is a thing of the past.
• Today, FHA transmits clean, sound data from its legacy systems. Data validity  has been consistently measured at 100%. The data warehouse middle layer is gone,  and data flow directly from the source system into the general ledger, improving  data management practices.

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• Japan, for example, is perhaps the leading XBRL exponent and from April this  year, will require all publicly­-traded companies – more than 8,000 – to  file in this form.
• “XBRL isn’t a solution, it’s an enabling tool, and once companies have sorted  out the external reporting bit, I think they’ll start to look at what they can  do internally,” says Chris Rodgers, partner at KPMG. “If you’re a global  organisation, the chances are you’re operating with a lot of disparate systems  that don’t match up and XBRL could significantly improve management reporting.”
• Mr Kelly likens it to the early years of the internet, when managers were trying  to assess the threats and opportunities. “Right now, it’s a lot like 1994, when  everyone knew the internet was going to be a cool, key tool, but we didn’t know  quite how to use it,” he says.

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• XBRL is fast becoming the universal language for the exchange of business  information and it is the future of financial reporting

• Another advantage to the SOA/composite application approach is  that it could help agencies avoid being locked in to one vendor’s software  package. Most orchestration packages save user-generated workflows in any of a  number of plain text- or XML-based languages, such as BPEL, the Business Process  Modeling Notation or the eXtensible Business Reporting Language.