More on the SEC’s Inline XBRL Announcement
The biggest story of last week was the SEC’s announcement that it would allow filers to use iXBRL, a specification which allows XBRL data to be embedded into an HTML presentation of a report.
We highly recommend that you spend a few minutes having a look at the SEC’s new iXBRL Viewer, which they demonstrated to more than 500 people at an XBRL US webinar held on Wednesday. The SEC’s Matthew Slavin starts a demonstration of the Viewer at around the 10 minute mark of this hour long, informative session. The live viewer is now available to examine iXBRL documents submitted to the SEC’s EDGAR system — the catch being that it will be a little while before US registrants start to file their financial statements in that manner. It will also to be released as an open source package that will allow other environments to use and build on the work of the SEC in this field.
The viewer provides a “head up display” for the data and data definitions associated with individual disclosures. This “looks like paper, acts like structured data” presentation is easy, intuitive and extremely powerful. One of the most flexible features is a search function that yields both HTML and XBRL results using either key words or XBRL metadata including definitions, labels, dimensions or FASB references.
The SEC Discussion on Inline XBRL for Public Company Filers webinar is available to view at the XBRL US website. The second Q&A session, with nearly 200 participants, focused on the needs of software companies and was held on Thursday.
The SEC has a web page outlining their new filing program and XII has prepared a Briefing Note on the subject.
