FASB and US GAAP "Go Semantic"!

You know, I never thought I would see the day; but here we are!  The Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) has published information about US GAAP semantics in global standard machine readable form.

The IFRS Foundation has done the same for International Financial Reporting Standards:
(This is my working prototype of AASB 1060 XBRL Taxonomy)
The GAAP meta model representation uses Accounting semantics  arcroles 1.0 first created by Campbell Pryde, the CEO of XBRL US but have subsequently been published by XBRL International as a global standard recommendation.

One thing that is incredibly interesting and useful is the capability to view and link to specific information in a tool provided by the FASB.  For example, if you click here you will be taken to specific information about inventory valuation reserves which includes references to the formal Accounting Standards Codification (ASC) published by the FASB.

As I see it, this is a milestone in financial accounting, reporting, auditing, and analysis.  This is a game changer.  People will be able to see and understand this soon enough.

Academic papers have called for publishing accounting standards in ontologies for years.  Well, here you go!  Granted, this is just a start...but it is a start.

Very nice work FASB!

What would be really great is to create the metadata for the AICPA's FRF for SMEs.  That can help accountants get their heads around what this "digital" stuff can be used for.  Maybe IFRS for SMEs also. Or, maybe AASB 1060 which is the equivalent to IFRS for SMEs for Australian companies.

Additional Information:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Relational Knowledge Graph System (RKGS)

Image
Relational Knowledge Graph System (RKGS) is an interesting idea that combines the relational paradigm and the knowledge graph paradigm.  This documentation, Why RKGS , explains the idea. This gets even more interesting with the notion of "relational AI".  RelationalAI is described as follows by the company of the same name, Relational.ai : “RelationalAI is a cloud-based relational knowledge graph management system, with state of the art probabilistic processing and declarative reasoning at scale to make developing Data Applications a superpower for your business.” This notion of knowledge graphs represented in relational databases fits into my belief that knowledge graphs have two aspects: the expression SYNTAX and the logic of what is expressed or SEMANTICS. While the LOGIC of a knowledge graph is always the same regardless of technical syntax used to express that logic; there are many, many different technical syntaxes that can be used to represent a knowledge graph. There
Read more

Getting Started with Auditchain Luca

Image
(Note that a newer, production version as opposed to only the development version , of Luca Suite is available) The Innovator's Dilemma points out that disruptive innovations often look like toys that are doing everything wrong. Auditchain Luca , which is part of the Auditchain Suite , is a unique approach to creating a knowledge graph .  To experience using Auditchain Luca, have a look at the Getting Started with Auditchain Luca instructions. Be sure to grab the Excel and JSON import files used for this getting started exercise.   This getting started exercise uses one of several different approaches to getting information into a tool for constructing and viewing professional quality knowledge graphs .  Additional getting started guides will be made available over time. Auditchain Luca might not make sense to you if you don't understand the paradigm shift that is occurring and if you have not shifted your mental map. For the next step in your journey, consider trying creat
Read more

Evaluating the Quality of XBRL-based Financial Reports

Image
From the time public companies started submitting XBRL-based financial reports to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, I have been looking at those reports, trying to understand the XBRL-based reports, and trying to figure out how to get them right.  That information was used to figure out how to create software applications that help professional accountants get these reports right. Here is information that summarizes my testing and results which I stopped doing March 31, 2019: Analysis of the high level accounting relationships in the 10-Ks of about 5,716 financial reports  (5,063 public companies, about 89.1% got all these high level accounting relationships consistent with expectation, 623 were inconsistent and manual confirmation revealed the inconsistency was an error) Documentation that helps you understand 26 different types of errors in XBRL-based reports High quality documentation of hundreds of errors in XBRL-based reports submitted by public companies to the SEC Doc
Read more