Financial Reporting to the SEC by Public Companies using US GAAP

Note that you should read the documents Logical Twins of Financial Reports, Understanding and Leveraging the “Semantic Glue” of XBRL-based Financial Reports, and Understanding Logical Objects of XBRL-based Financial Reports prior to tacking the information on this blog post.

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The Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) publishes US GAAP in the Accounting Standards Codification (ASC).  The FASB also publishes an XBRL taxonomy each year. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) uses the XBRL taxonomy for US GAAP published by the FASB.  XBRL taxonomies are "active" per the SEC for a period of time, then they are removed from the list of allowed versions of the XBRL taxonomy.

The SEC publishes an RSS feed of all XBRL-based reports submitted to the SEC. The RSS feed is available in a number of forms.

The following provides information that is helpful to working with XBRL-based financial reports effectively.  The information uses the 2017 version of the US GAAP XBRL Taxonomy.

US GAAP Financial Reporting Scheme (XBRL Taxonomy): (alternative documentation approach)

• All the files published by the FASB: http://xbrl.fasb.org/us-gaap/2017/ 
• Elements: http://xbrl.fasb.org/us-gaap/2017/elts/us-gaap-2017-01-31.xsd 
• Labels: http://xbrl.fasb.org/us-gaap/2017/elts/us-gaap-lab-2017-01-31.xml 
• References: http://xbrl.fasb.org/us-gaap/2017/elts/us-gaap-ref-2017-01-31.xml 
• Element Documentation: http://xbrl.fasb.org/us-gaap/2017/elts/us-gaap-doc-2017-01-31.xml

Additional machine readable information is created to supplement the information provided by the FASB.  This additional metadata is necessary to effectively verify the quality of XBRL-based reports, extract information from the reports effectively, etc.

Model structure rules: These rules are used to verify that the XBRL presentation relations are represented logically. These could be published by XBRL International, the FASB, the SEC, or some other authority.  But, because they are not; I have published this information to help create reports correctly.

• http://accounting.auditchain.finance/2022/kg/us-gaap/model-structure/model-structure-rules-def.xml
• More strict alternative: http://xbrlsite.com/seattlemethod/cm/model-structure-rules-strict-def.xml

Additional Math Rules: Additional mathematical rules are published because the FASB nor the SEC provides things like roll forward rules or member aggregation rules.

• http://accounting.auditchain.finance/2022/kg/us-gaap/mathematics/mathematics2.xsd

Fundamental Accounting Concept Rules: These rules test and cross check fundamental accounting concepts and the high-level relations between those concepts in a report.

• http://www.xbrlsite.com/2021/kg/us-gaap/fac/ReportingStyles/COMID-BSC-CF1-ISM-IEMIB-OILY-SPEC6_schema.xsd

Type-subtype Relations: These relations, also referred to as "wider-narrower" or "general-special" relations help users of the taxonomy understand the appropriate use of report elements.

• http://accounting.auditchain.finance/2022/kg/us-gaap/type-subtype/type-subtype.xsd

Disclosures: Neither the FASB nor SEC explicitly define the names of disclosures.  As such, I publish a list of disclosure names (this is a PROTOTYPE to give you an idea of the number of disclosures and what I mean by the notion of a disclosure: (example human readable list)

• http://accounting.auditchain.finance/2022/kg/us-gaap/disclosures-topics/disclosures.xsd

Disclosure Mechanics Rules: The disclosure mechanics rules describe the essence of each disclosure so that the disclosure can be detected in financial reports using prototype theory. This is necessary because as was said above, neither the FASB nor SEC provides these identifiers or explicitly describe each disclosure.

• http://accounting.auditchain.finance/2022/kg/us-gaap/disclosure-mechanics/disclosure-mechanics.xsd

Reporting Checklist Rules: These rules help check to make sure the necessary disclosures have been provided in a report. This is somewhat like the "memory joggers" used by accountants to make sure the necessary disclosures have been provided.

• http://accounting.auditchain.finance/2022/kg/us-gaap/reporting-checklist/reporting-checklist2-rules-def.xml

Microsoft reports: This is a machine readable list of all the reports submitted to the SEC by Microsoft (as of a few years ago)

• http://accounting.auditchain.finance/2022/kg/ListReports.txt

Tool for Extracting FAC Information from Microsoft Reports: This is an Excel spreadsheet that uses macros to extract the fundamental accounting concepts from all of the Microsoft reports in the list provided above. (Here are some additional extraction tools.)

• https://www.xbrlsite.com/2024/Library/Extract-Microsoft.zip

Software Companies Prototypes: This is a set of companies that generally provide good quality reports to the SEC: Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Salesforce.  There are a number of different reporting styles represented in that set of reports.

• http://xbrl.squarespace.com/journal/2020/4/2/software-companies-prototype.html

Reading, Verifying, and Extracting Information from Report: This documents the process of getting a report, reading the report, verifying that the report is OK, and the extracting information from the report

• http://www.xbrlsite.com/2024/Library/Extraction.pdf

The Challenge: I throw down the following challenge. Every test below proves that software has the effective control of a report that it needs to have to use and understand that report effectively. Software should enable all of the following: (Examples of comparisons)

• Level 1: Extract information from the list of Microsoft reports and prove that the balance sheet balances for each report.
• Level 2: Extract information from the list of Microsoft reports and prove that none of the fundamental accounting concept relations are being violated.
• Level 3: Extract information from one Microsoft report and identify each block of information in that report.
• Level 4: Extract information from one Microsoft report and identify each financial disclosure in that report.
• Level 5: Extract information from the list of Microsoft reports and identify each financial disclosure in each report and do a side-by-side comparison of each disclosure.
• Level 6: Extract information from the list of Microsoft reports, identify each financial disclosure, and provide an analysis of the changes in the disclosures provided; what disclosures were added, what disclosures were removed, each year.
• Level 7: Extract information for a portion of a set of  Microsoft reports and compare that information across different reporting periods.
• Level 8: Extract information from Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Salesforce and do a peer comparison between those companies for a period for any disclosure.

Being able to do all the above proves that you have proper control of software to process reports effectively.  Next step is to do the same things for IFRS reports submitted to the SEC.  Then, IFRS reports submitted to the ESMA.

Additional Information:

• Analysis of 6,751 XBRL-based Public Company 10-Ks Submitted to SEC
• Fundamental Accounting Concepts and Reporting Styles
• Microsoft XBRL-based Report Analysis
• Knowledge Graph of Microsoft Financial Report
• Essentials of XBRL-based Digital Financial Reports
• Reference Implementation of XBRL-based Public Company Financial Filing to SEC
• DOW 30 Dashboard
• FASB and US GAAP "Go Semantic"
• PROOF
• Prototype Repository Dashboard