General Purpose Financial Reporting Support for XBRL

“Paper is just an object that information has been sprayed onto in the past.” Ted Nelson

Think about something.  What if someone desired to use XBRL-based reporting but they are not mandated to report to some regulator like the SEC, FDIC, or ESMA; then what "profile" of XBRL would they use? What if there was a "general profile" for working with XBRL that could, say, be used internally within a business for consolidation, internally for cost accounting, for creating benchmarking systems, for sharing information with peer organizations, and other such use cases.

Well, the Seattle Method is such an application profile for general XBRL-based reporting that does not need to meet some arbitrary regulator reporting regime.  While the Seattle Method cannot be called an industry de facto standard (yet); the Seattle Method inspired the creation of the Standard Business Report Model (SBRM) by OMG.  The Standard Business Report Model is a logical conceptualization of a business report that is independent of any technical syntax.

In the early days of XBRL-based reporting, software vendors would commonly build support for only one specific XBRL taxonomy and for reporting to one specific regulator.  Now that there are numerous regulators making use of XBRL, software vendors are realizing that that is not the best idea.  Today, software that only supported XBRL-based reporting to the SEC has been modified to also enable XBRL-based reporting using the ESEF to ESMA.

Perhaps it is appropriate that individual regulators to sometimes create their own proprietary application profile of XBRL; it is always necessary?  What if there was one global standard universal digital financial reporting framework?  A universal general purpose reporting framework and each regulator creating their own specific application profile are not mutually exclusive.

Here are a handful (my GOLDEN VERSIONS) of XBRL-based reporting schemes that I have created, all are compliant to the Seattle Method, and all should be supported (could be supported) by XBRL-based reporting software applications: (form more information see START HERE)

  1. Accounting Equation
  2. SFAC 6
  3. SFAC 8
  4. Common Elements of Financial Report (Four Statement Model), Version 1
  5. Common Elements of Financial Report (Four Statement Model), Version 2
  6. Common Elements of Financial Report (Four Statement Model), Version 3
  7. Essence
  8. MINI Financial Reporting Scheme
  9. MINI Financial Reporting Scheme with Business Events and Classic Transactions
  10. PROOF Financial Reporting Scheme | Repository of Reports
  11. XASB Financial Reporting Scheme
  12. AASB 1060 Financial Reporting Scheme (Prototype)
  13. Not for Profit Financial Reporting Scheme in US (Prototype)
  14. School District Accounting Manual (SDAM), Washington, State (Prototype)
  15. Primary Financial Statements for IFRS (Prototype)
  16. Lipsum (Prototype)
Each of the XBRL-based taxonomies and XBRL instances provided within those prototypes is of ultra-high quality, heavily tested, guaranteed to be consistent with the XBRL technical specification, and follows the Seattle Method framework or "application profile".  Any off-the-shelf software application that says it supports XBRL will be able  to work with the XBRL taxonomies and XBRL instances for each of the 9 prototypes.  You can use the above XBRL taxonomies and XBRL instances as benchmarks to access software capabilities and functionality.  In addition, that off-the-shelf software should have no trouble with this conformance suite.

Here are four more complex examples; these are accounting workpapers, auditing working papers and schedules, and financial analysis models:

TESTING: You can use these IMPORT FILES and DOCUMENTATION for testing, benchmarking, reverse engineering, etc.

Each of the 9 prototypes above are supported by and heavily tested using the following XBRL software applications currently:
If any software wants their software tested to be sure if follows the spirit of the Seattle Method or wants to understand the OMG Standard Business Report Model (SBRM) better, please do not hesitate to contact me on LinkedIn or send me an email.


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