Constructing Financial Analysis Models Using XBRL

Several days ago I came across this LinkedIn post related to an "MBA on One Page".  Effectively what it was about was a financial analysis model.  This is what it looked like:

So what I figured is that I would represent that entire model using XBRL.  Here you go, financial analysis XBRL taxonomy: (this is still a work in progress)

There is still a lot of work to do to build it out, debug it to remove errors, etc.  Also, there are some choices to make. Overall it is an excellent test of the capabilities of XBRL.

So the link above is to the actual model.  Here is a machine understandable global standard logical spreadsheet that represents (will eventually) the information in that original Excel spreadsheet.

And this is the verification report for that global standard logical spreadsheet.

This is the raw XBRL report itself which will load into any off-the-shelf XBRL software that supports the global standard fully and correctly.  This is the report model for that report.

Independent of the actual report, you can make sure the report that represents the analysis is correct by checking it with universal business rules that are separately provided. Here is a prototype of many of those universal business rules that explain the mathematical logic of the report.

You can reliably extract information from that financial analysis model and do things such as compare multiple models.

You can communicate more precisely with someone leveraging the precision of XBRL (decimals, data types, dimensions, entity identifiers, etc.).

You can pivot the model, like a pivot table.  Try that here.