Disclosures

A disclosure is something that is disclosed within a financial report.  To understand the disclosure, it is best to first understand the notion of the block. If you understand atomic design methodology you will understand what blocks and disclosures are useful.  Effectively, blocks and disclosures are logical assemblies of facts within a report or some set of reports.

But if you try and search the US GAAP or IFRS XBRL taxonomies for disclosures you will be unsatisfied by the result.  Why? Because neither the US GAAP nor IFRS XBRL taxonomies has the notion of "disclosure" and provides no identifiers which enables software to identify, find, and work with disclosures.  Further, neither the Accounting Standards Codification (ASC) for US GAAP or IFRS Accounting Standards Navigator for IFRS provide identifiers for disclosure or name disclosures.

However that is exactly what is necessary to get a machine such as a software application to be able to identify and work with specific disclosures.

But what if there were such a list of named disclosures for US GAAP and IFRS?  Well, if you check out the links there; you see that I have created such lists (working prototypes).  But you still have to somehow connect the list of explicitly named disclosures and the US GAAP or IFRS XBRL-based representations of disclosures.  Did that also with my disclosure mechanics rules.  Those disclosure mechanics rules effectively define the essence of a disclosure and can be used to identify specific disclosures with financial reports.

Software such as XBRL Cloud, Pesseract, Auditchain Pacioli, Auditchain Luca and other such software leverages that metadata to find and work with financial disclosures.

Very detailed testing was performed on the Microsoft 10-K for 2017. (Another version of that experimentation and testing.)  Two different software applications get very similar results.

Here are artifacts for one specific disclosure, the disclosure:BalanceSheet.

The ultimate objective is to be able to do an as reported or a normalized comparison of any block of information that represents any disclosure provided between different reporting periods for the same reporting entity (i.e. period comparison) and/or between reporting entities (i.e. peer comparison).

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