JUST XBRL

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Mandate of XBRL of XBRL is great news! It’s a triumph for SEC Chairman Christopher Cox, who played a pivotal role in ensuring the modernization of IT infrastructure of the EDGAR filing system based on XBRL — an initiative that may be a his most lasting legacy and final feather in his cap.

And, of course, the SEC’s XBRL mandate is great news for the financial community at large. XBRL holds the promise of revolutionizing business reporting on a global scale, dramatically improving the relationship between people, processes, accounting standards, and financial information. How? By ensuring that a company’s financial reporting is always an authoritative reflection of the latest version of the truth within the enterprise.

XBRL lets reviewers look at financial data in a highly interactive format that is much more accessible by various line-of-business applications and composite applications. Documents empowered with XBRL are more richly described and can be consumed much more readily by applications such as risk management, financial analysis, and audit.

Chairman Cox puts the matter plainly when he says that XBRL “means allowing average Americans the ability to view exactly the financial information that they want. We are on a campaign to liberate business and financial information that…is currently trapped inside dense documents.”. With adoption of this mandate, the SEC moves from document disclosure to data disclosure improving searchablity and accessibility. XBRL makes the rendering.of financial data in its various forms more easily accessible to investors.

XBRL is already mandated for financial filings in multiple jurisdictions worldwide, so the SEC mandate simply moves the U.S. into global alignment with other regulators. Also, the SEC mandate, combined with the trend toward the adoption of the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), opens the possibility for true global comparability of financial documents.

To date, the potential for XBRL remains largely unexplored due to the gap between worker knowledge and access to new services that can view, consume, and work with this new format. Financial documents still remain largely focused on unstructured and disconnected data built and viewed with non-XBRL aware applications.

Going forward, however, the SEC announcement in combination with new advances in XBRL data-centric documents-based technology, management, search capabilities and dynamic content enrichment offer a promising lifeline to help solve XBRL’s tenuous relationship with people and task-oriented knowledge. One thing is for sure — XBRL is not going away, so it is time for organizations to get comfortable with the standard and create a solid plan for adoption.

EContent magazine announced that JustSystems made the EContent 100 (EC100) List for the third year in a row. A team of 14 judges gathered in the EC100 judging wiki for a month, reviewing previous list members and considering contenders. Judges voted for or against every company and wrote comments about why they made their decisions, the group said.
“Members of the EC100 List are the companies empowering the content that fuels business today,” said Michelle Manafy, editor-in-chief of EContent magazine. “For the third time, JustSystems has proven its ability to impact the market with its XML-based software solutions for structured authoring and content collaboration.” Read the rest of this entry »

Christopher Cox, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chairman, said in a speech to the American Institute of Certified Practicing Accountants (AICPA) national conference on current SEC and PCAOB developments yesterday, the commission would later this month finalise its proposed rule on the eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL). He noted the International Accounting Standards Committee (IASC) Foundation and AICPA had been aggressively supporting XBRL to provide investors with all public company financial reports in interactive data format. The rule would significantly advance the objective of having 30 different spoken languages soon embedded in XBRL data tags attached to public company financial statements, enabling investors read an International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) or US GAAP financial statements from any country in their own native language. ‘The only real question is not whether this is good for investors, but how quickly both the accounting standards and the process by which they are established and developed can be globally recognized as world-class.‘ he said.

By Ephraim Schwartz, IDG News Service - November 25, 2008

The XML-based financial reporting standard could help IT streamline messy financial processes

Like any government mandate, the SEC’s requirement to use XBRL (Extensible Business Reporting Language) in public companies’ financial reports cannot be ignored. However, along with the government stick comes a number of beneficial carrots.

Up until now, many companies have lived in a document-centric world where finding the right information might require someone to read a 100-page filing to get the one piece of data they need. The use of XBRL moves documents from being about big unstructured ideas to those that have a lot more structure, making them more consumable and more reusable, says Mike Willis, a partner at auditor PricewaterhouseCoopers and the founding chairman of XBRL International, a supply-chain consortium representing more than 600 companies.

“XBRL takes the same exact document and structures it, so you can say show me everything related to this topic,” Willis notes. Once data becomes more interactive, it becomes multidimensional, linking users back to authoritative documentation, says Diane Mueller, vice president of XBRL Development for JustSystems, an XML tools provider.

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By Ephraim Schwartz, IDG News Service November 25, 2008
Given all the pressures IT is under, another compliance initiative may seem to be one too many. There is such a mandate: to submit financial reports using XBRL (Extensible Business Reporting Language) tags. How much will the XBRL mandate add to IT’s burden? At first, the burden will be small, but it will increase over time — as will the opportunity to use XBRL for better internal operations, not just for reporting compliance.

The purpose of the XBRL mandate is to make corporate financial information more easily available to stockholders — and to make sure companies are really reporting the same things, the federal government has mandated the use of XBRL (Extensible Business Reporting Language).

The first SEC deadline for public companies with a market cap of $5 billion or more to submit financial reports in interactive data, aka XBRL format, is set for Dec. 15, 2008. A year later, most Fortune 1500 companies must provide interactive XBRL data, and a year after that, all public companies will be required to submit the annual 10-K and quarterly 10-Q financial reports as interactive data.

After that, companies should expect the SEC to require more financial documents to be published in XBRL format and for other government agencies to begin mandating its use as well, says Diane Mueller, vice president of XBRL Development for JustSystems, an XML tools provider. John Stantial, assistant comptroller at the conglomerate United Technologies Corp. (UTC), expects to see the Department of Labor, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Bureau of Economic Analysis adopt XBRL as a requirement.

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Diane Mueller, vice president, XBRL development for JustSystems,  presented a session at 29th Annual FASB/SEC Accounting Institute Conference offering practical tips for XBRL Survival. The 29th Annual FASB/SEC Accounting Institute Conference brings together industry leaders to discuss and respond to today’s rapidly changing accounting rules. The goal of the event is to provide attendees with the most up-to-date information they need to achieve compliance with today’s accounting standards.

The presentation covered how the potential for reduced costs, improved information access, and near real-time financial analysis are making XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) a top-of-mind business issue. With an SEC mandate for XBRL just around the corner, organizations are actively researching the steps they need to take to achieve compliance with this initiative.

Attendees shared ideas and practical advice with each other as to how organizations can seamlessly migrate to the XBRL reporting standard. The event was held on November 19 and 20 in Las Vegas, NV at the Rio All-Suite Hotel and Casino.

The session was titled “Preparing for the XBRL Mandate,” covered timelines and implications of the coming SEC mandata as well as practical advice onnhow to create XBRL tagged documents and use software to improve the reliability and consistency of data in income statements, cash flow statements, and balance sheets. For a copy of the presentation, please email sales@justsystems.com

For more information on the 29th Annual FASB/SEC Accounting Institute Conference, visit http://www.eeiconferences.com/fasbsec.htm.

JustSystems is pleased to confirm JustSystems’ sponsorship of Dave Raggett for the coming year as a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Fellow to promote role of the Semantic Web for financial data at appropriate venues and through meetings with relevant organizations including XBRL.org. We look forward to the launching of  a W3C Interest Group on the Semantic Web and Financial Services to look for standardization opportunities complementing the role of XBRL.org and working with the W3C to develop interoperable technologies (specifications, guidelines, software, and tools) to lead the Web to leverage XBRL’s full potential.

WICI, the World’s Business Reporting Network, Releases Framework and XBRL Taxonomy to Promote Quality and Transparency in Business Reporting; Makes Call For Public Comments.

The framework addresses global capital market needs for information about a company’s opportunities, risks, strategies and plans. WICI, the world’s business reporting network, today announced that it has released its first version of a comprehensive information framework and XBRL taxonomy to help companies better communicate with their investors and other stakeholders about business strategy and performance. WICI also called for public comments from the business reporting community on the framework and taxonomy.

WICI-Japan and the Enhanced Business Reporting Consortium (EBRC), the U.S. member of WICI, collaborated to develop the WICI Framework Version 1.0. The Enhanced Business Reporting (EBCR) Framework and the Japan Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry Guidelines for Intellectual Asset-based Management are the foundation for the WICI Framework. In addition, JustSystems assisted WICI-Japan and PricewaterhouseCoopers collaborated with the EBRC to develop XBRL taxonomies for the WICI Framework. JustSystems’ Keiko Takehara actively participated in the development of the taxonomy with WICI-Japan’s team. Read the rest of this entry »

JustSystems and EDGAR(R) Online, Inc. (NASDAQ:EDGR), today announced a strategic alliance to deliver XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) to the desktop so that stakeholders can easily view, analyze and work with XBRL data. The partnership was announced at the 18th XBRL International Conference taking place in Washington, D.C. on Oct. 15–16.  EDGAR Online was the first to make SEC filings available in real-time on the Internet and is currently the leader in delivering XBRL data, products and solutions to the marketplace. Read the rest of this entry »

By Robert J. Boeri - October 2008 Issue, Posted Sep 29, 2008

As a subscriber to many print publications, I now have a problem that I believe will soon affect consumers and publishers alike: resistance to increasing print subscription costs. I realized for some time that the problem was coming—print publications are increasingly expensive to create, produce, and deliver—but the problem really struck home when I received my biannual renewal notice for The Wall Street Journal. In my undergraduate days, I was a willing victim when I accepted a teaser offer of $16 for a 1-year subscription. I knew that price wouldn’t last, but I became hooked and since then I’ve renewed every 2 years, including the digital edition. However, this year’s bill gave me a case of sticker shock at nearly 30 times the original teaser price. Read the rest of this entry »