Continuing the series on ten areas I had hoped XBRL would help.

We are officially in the 20^th anniversary month for XBRL. On October 14, 1999, we (then known as XFRML rather than XBRL) kicked off at the AICPA offices in New York. Two weeks later, at the Palmer House Hilton in Chicago, committees were set up and the effort was underway.

At the October 14 session, the first steering committee decided that, ““[XFRML] should have its roots in the "Audit Supply Chain" and “XFRML [would be a] technical standard for seamless process of exchange across all audit processes.” Financial statements would be included in the standardization, but so would underlying detail, and even accounting literature.

While most people think of XBRL as a way to provide structure to financial statements, or maybe even tax returns and regulatory filings, I have never given up on that vision. I felt that you should be able to follow a fact from its entry into the system through to reports and back via a “gossamer thread”, subject to appropriate access rights.

And so a number of my ten goals deal with that side of the report, and number 9 from the August 18 blog entry was, “Standardizing automated and manual linkages to source documents, data and facts (disc)”.

I should explain “DISC”. XBRL GL was designed to serve as a bridge … or really, serve to bridge many different things. From detail to end report, we had the basic mapping tools in the first version of XBRL GL, and later added many more tools in a module called SRCD – “summary reporting contextual data”. It was about providing all of the tools needed to produce any number of XML Schema/XBRL Taxonomy-based instance documents (or provide the context to see the detail that agrees to or reconciles to existing instances.) DISC – “detailed incoming support concepts” was the gossamer thread in the other direction. Wherever you need to go to find the underlying detailed content – a SQL query to a database, a cell in an Excel spreadsheet, 15 lines down and 5 words over on page 213 of a PDF – DISC would get you there and drive any necessary and appropriate transformations of the data.

While XBRL never had as a goal making any more confidential information public or accessible than was required or desired, where access rights would allow it, SRCD would get you from a report to XBRL GL and DISC would dig you down to the original source.

I have since found some overlapping specifications: in particular, OASIS Business Document Exchange (BDXR) and UN/CEFACT SBDH (Standard Business Document Header). And the emergence of blockchain and distributed ledger technologies highlights data that might serve as the starting point (when the transaction is the documentation) and the beneficiary (when the blockchain is the immutable audit trail, serving as the aggregator and single united version of the trust from other sources.)