Machine Interpretable US GAAP Metadata

Accounts, auditors, and analysts are about to get a significant productivity boost; complements of XBRL. Hard to believe, right? That hard to use, complicated monstrosity the regulators force you to use. If you don't know what SKOS, XBRL, OIM, and SBRM are; you are way, way behind the curve.

The purpose of this blog post is to think about US GAAP metadata.  United States Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (US GAAP) is the financial reporting framework used by public companies, private companies including small and medium sized organizations, not for profit organizations, and other such organizations.

Like most, if not all financial reporting scheme; US GAAP is "grounded" in the fundamental accounting equation which is the basis for double entry bookkeeping (a.k.a. double entry accounting). Information for every financial related business event is recorded in the form of a balanced financial transaction similar to the financial transaction shown below (from Wikipedia):


Financial transactions are entered into a journal and each of the journal entries are posted to a set of ledger account.  A company's ledger accounts are mapped to financial report line items.

Again, all this is "grounded" in the fundamental accounting equation, which is some version of:
Assets = Liabilities + Equity
The Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) publishes a conceptual framework.  The FASB describes their conceptual framework as, 
"The Conceptual Framework is a body of interrelated objectives and fundamentals. The objectives identify the goals and purposes of financial reporting and the fundamentals are the underlying concepts that help achieve those objectives."
Part of the FASB conceptual framework is Statement of Financial Accounting Concepts (SFAC) No. 8, Chapter 4, Elements of Financial Statements (December 2021) which defines 10 interrelated elements of a financial statement which are:
  • Assets
  • Liabilities
  • Equity
  • Investments by Owners
  • Distributions to Owners
  • Comprehensive Income
  • Revenues
  • Expenses
  • Gains
  • Losses

I represented these 10 interrelated financial statement elements using XBRL.  Here I used an earlier version of the FASB's same 10 elements from SFAC No. 6 which you can find here.

Now, the 10 elements above are not actually line items that you might find in a financial statement. As stated on page 2, paragraph E6 of SFAC No. 8: (emphasis is mine)

"Elements of financial statements are the building blocks with which financial statements are  constructed. The term elements refers to broad classes, such as assets, liabilities, revenues, and expenses. This chapter focuses on the broad classes and their characteristics and does not discuss or define particular items that might meet the elements definitions."

So, the elements of a financial statement defined by the FASB help you think about the financial reporting framework.  I did not find that particularly practical when it came to actually thinking about particular financial statement line items.

What I did was analyze actual financial reports submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission by public companies from about 2013 to 2018, all 10-Ks, (here are details of those results). I analyzed about 6,000 reports per year for six years and then synthesized a better version of the "building blocks" or "broad classes" of high-level financial statement line items.  Here are those particular and I think more practical high-level financial statement line items, about 100 such high-level line items: (this is a working proof of concept)

Then what I did was MAP the 100 or so high-level fundamental accounting concepts (a.k.a. line items) to the US GAAP XBRL Taxonomy concepts.  I don't have a print out of those mappings and I am revising how I do this.  Right now, I have TWO sets of mappings: (you can open these in off-the-shelf XBRL software)


My focus here is not the human readable picklists.  My focus is on ultra high quality and ultra usable machine interpretable information that also can be published to be read by humans. My focus is first on US GAAP and then I will also do what I can for International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS).  I will likely flip-flop between the two financial reporting frameworks.

Here are the beginnings of an analysis. This Excel spreadsheet has a macro that loads all 63 XBRL-based reports of Apple which were submitted to the SEC.  I took the 10-K information for 2015 to 2025 and loaded that into another XBRL-based report. You can experiment with that, here is a text file that contains a list of the Apple reports:


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