Inline XBRL - Feedback Sought
On Sunday, August 11, I am scheduled to be part of a workshop at the American Accounting Association (AAA) National Conference about the transition in the United States from “traditional” XBRL to Inline XBRL.
The applicable Final Rule, https://www.sec.gov/rules/final/2018/33-10514.pdf, lays out the three year roll-out, beginning with large accelerated US GAAP filers for fiscal periods ending on or after June 15, 2019 on their first 10-Q, 20-F and 40-F.
I am very interested in hearing about our readers’ experiences with Inline XBRL.
For Filers:
• Was it like “turning on a light switch”, because your software made the change in output from traditional to Inline XBRL a transparent experience? Did it act as a catalyst for you to change your service provider or software vendor?
• Did it change your preparation and/or review processes? What aspects of your workflow did it impact? In particular, did it make it simpler for those responsible for financial statement preparation but not familiar with the technical aspects of XBRL to provide oversight and feedback?
• Did you find any part of the rules, guidance or implementation surprising?
For data users:
• Have you found advantages to the new document? (There is no technical “loss”, as the SEC produces (“extracts”) the traditional XBRL instance document from the Inline HTML page.) Are you coming up with new text mining procedures to leverage the HTML and new metadata?
• Despite the theoretical lack of loss, did you find the Inline filings to have trade-offs in practice?
• One of the theories about Inline XBRL is that it would reduce the need to create customizations to the taxonomies to conform the SEC’s rendering of the XBRL to the HTML. Did you discover fewer extension concepts in the taxonomies associated with Inline submissions than those with the traditional XBRL before it?
Although the mandate has not kicked in yet – it’s just June 14, certainly not 40 days after June 15, and most 10-Qs would be for the period ending June 30, not June 15 – I’m glad to say my team has a much larger sample of Inline XBRL filings to be looked at in advance of August 11 than I thought (June 30 plus 40 days is awfully close to August 11.)
A peek at the latest RSS feed for Inline XBRL filings from the SEC (https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/xbrl-inline.rss.xml), with the 200 most recent filings covering a period from May 8 to June 12, reveals that 184 filers, large and small, voluntarily provided Inline XBRL for their 3/31 (or thereabouts) 10-Qs (and 9 10-Ks were also provided during that time period). Amongst them you’ll find Coca Cola, Famous Dave’s (BBQ), and NOODLES & Company (it must be lunch time). The list of the last 200 doesn’t include many of the “usual suspects”, like Delta Airlines and The Hershey Company (back to the food theme), so usage is growing.
What has been your experience with the changeover?
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