Best Practices for Automating Record to Report (R2R)

This is a working prototype (currently a work in progress, but builds on a prior successful working prototype) that demonstrate the fundamentals of what is necessary to successfully and effectively create a repeatable process that can reliably be used to autogenerate a financial report. Such a financial report may, or may not, be rendered in the XBRL format. This process can be used to generate financial reports in human readable formats like Excel, Word, HTML, PDF, or machine-readable formats such as XBRL, RDF/OWL/SHACL, Prolog, SQL, GQL, JSON, XML, etc.

Fundamentally, if you are unable to control and verify a report; then the process is not reliable and cannot be depended upon to effectively autogenerate a high-quality report; and such a system cannot be deemed adequate. No step specified can be removed from this method; however, additional steps can be specified to automate more of this process.

Audit Data Standards (ADS) Prototype

This is a working prototype of standard audit data schedules that can be used by external reporting teams, internal auditors, or external auditors to generated information from an accounting system that supports an internal or external financial report.

• Overview: (Human | Machine ) This is an overview and entry point for the ADS.
• Terms: (Human | Machine) These are the terms.
• Structures: (Human | Machine) These are the structures into which terms fit.
• Processes: (Human | Machine) These are the processes into which structures fit.
• Download (all files in this section)
• XBRL Taxonomy Schema Entry Point
• XBRL Taxonomy Schema, Terms
• XBRL Taxonomy Schema, Structures (Schedules)
• XBRL Taxonomy Schema, Processes

Example of ADS

This is an example of audit data schedules (ADS) extracted from an accounting system prototype and represented in an XBRL format of the XBRL Global ledger style (i.e. tuples rather than dimensions based).

• Accounting System Prototype (information below was extracted from this prototype accounting system, Microsoft Access and Excel versions)
• Download (Contains all the files below and above)
• XBRL instance, Chart of Accounts
• XBRL instance, Supplier Master Data
• XBRL instance, Accounts Payable Open Items
• XBRL instance, Customer Master Data
• XBRL instance, Accounts Receivable Open Items
• XBRL instance, Bank Reconciliation
• XBRL instance, Fixed Asset Master Data
• XBRL instance, General Ledger Entries
• XBRL instance, Inventory List
• XBRL instance, Long Term Debt Instruments

Link Between Audit Schedules and Financial Report

Audit schedules support the balances as of a point in time and transactions between two points in time.

NOTE: The links are currently to a prior prototype; they will be updated for this specific prototype over time.

• Links between Audit Schedules and Financial Report
• Trial Balance
• Transactions
• Roll Forward (one example, see each balance sheet line item roll forward)

General Journal Entries in various formats

This is an example of general journal entries in a number of different formats. These general journal entries were used to autogenerate the XBRL-based financial report provided in a later section.

NOTE: The above TRIAL BALANCE is a summary of GL transactions by CHART OF ACCOUNTS for real (i.e. permanent, balance sheet); the above TRANSACTIONS is a summary of GL transactions by 'Transaction Code Grouping' which is information missing from most accounting systems. This is what enables the proper generation of the roll forwards and TRANSACTIONS groupings.

• General journal entries, ADS format (same as above)
• General journal entries, XBRL Global Ledger style
• General journal entries, Plain Text Accounting format (Information about plain text accounting)
• General journal entries, Excel
• General journal entries, CSV

Financial Disclosures

This is an example of and information related to disclosures and the mechanical rules that drive the creation of such financial disclosures.

NOTE: There is commercial support for US GAAP disclosure rules, and an example is provided below. XBRL Cloud does not currently support this prototype profile I am using to create reports, so I could not provide an HTML based example; Pesseract does support disclosure mechanics rules.

• Disclosures (Human Readable), rules for individual disclosures
• Disclosure Mechanics Rule Example (Human Readable)
• Disclosure Rules Example for US GAAP, commercial implementation by XBRL Cloud
• Disclosure Mechanics Rule Example (Human Readable), Microsoft with 94.8% coverage of entire report
• XBRL Taxonomy Schema, Disclosure Mechanics
• Disclosure Rules
• Disclosure Rule: Accounts Payable Roll Forward
• Disclosure Rule: Assets Roll Up
• Disclosure Rule: Balance Sheet
• Disclosure Rule: Cash and Cash Equivalents Roll Forward
• Disclosure Rule: Cash Flow Roll Forward
• Disclosure Rule: Cash Flow Statement
• Disclosure Rule: Changes in Equity
• Disclosure Rule: Income Statement 2
• Disclosure Rule: Inventories Roll Forward
• Disclosure Rule: Liabilities and Equity Roll Up
• Disclosure Rule: Long-term Debt Roll Forward
• Disclosure Rule: Net Cash Flow Roll Up
• Disclosure Rule: Property, Plant and Equipment Roll Forward
• Disclosure Rule: Receivables Roll Forward
• Disclosure Rule: Retained Earnings Roll Forward
• Disclosure Rule: Transactions Roll Up
• Disclosure Rule: Trial Balance Roll Up
• Disclosure Rules Extended Link Roles
• Disclosures XBRL Taxonomy Schema
• Disclosures XBRL Presentation relations
• Disclosures Labels
• Disclosure Mechanics and Disclosure Rules Arcroles (Semantics that drive the disclosure mechanics rules)

Financial Reporting Checklist (Disclosure Checklist, a.k.a. Disclosure Rules)

This is an example of and information related to machine-readable reporting checklists or disclosure checklists as contrast to the current human readable 'memory joggers' that are used by accountants.

• Reporting Checklist (Human Readable), what is required to be disclosed and when
• Disclosure Rules
• Disclosure Mechanics and Disclosure Rules Arcroles (Semantics)
• Understanding what I mean by reporting checklist or disclosure checklist

Financial Reporting Standards Reporting Taxonomy (Prototype)

This is an example of and information related to XBRL-based taxonomies created to support the creation of XBRL-based financial reports by reporting economic entities.

NOTE: This is currently incomplete but will be built out. See the US GAAP XBRL Taxonomy example to understand what the completed version will look like.

• Terms
• Structures (Represented using networks)
• Associations (represented using XBRL presentation relations here)
• Type-subtype relations (human readable 'type-subtype' or 'wider-narrower' or 'general-special' associations
• Base taxonomy XBRL taxonomy schema entry point
• Example of Base Taxonomy, Not-for-Profit accounting standards for US GAAP (Not complete, but enought to get the idea of what is needed)
• Example of Base Taxonomy, US GAAP (Not complete, but enought to get the idea of what is needed)

Financial Report of Reporting Entity (reference implementation of financial report)

This is an example of and information related to XBRL-based reports created by an economic entity.

NOTE: Currently, this example is from a prior prototype. This current prototype will be updated to include all of the examples that you see below.

• Pixel perfect Inline XBRL Autogenerated (i.e. no human involvement in creating report, 100% driven by metadata) representation of financial report
• Pixel perfect Inline XBRL Autogenerated PLUS embeded Inline XBRL Viewer
• Unformatted Inline XBRL autogenerated
• Raw XBRL, 100% autogenerated
• Human Readable autogerated HTML rendering generated from only Raw XBRL instance within included report validation information
• All supporting XBRL files used for validation of XBRL-based financial report (remember, this is an older prototype...this will be updated)
• Information helpful to economic entities creating XBRL-based reports
• Self Guided Tour of XBRL-based Financial Report

Financial Analysis of Reported Information (extraction of information from report)

This is information about how to extract information from a financial report and a repository of reports that demonstrate that extraction works and how to effectively extract information.

NOTE: Currently, extracting information from a report is demonstrated using another prototype; this will be replaced with repository specific to this ADS prototype over time.

• Repository Dashboard (dashboard of reported information)
• Machine readable RSS feed demonstrating how to specify a list of reports, a repository
• Excel spreadsheet used to extract information from XBRL-based financial report
• Commercially available dashboard of XBRL-based reoprts submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission provided by XBRL Cloud
• Base taxonomy XBRL taxonomy schema entry point

Testing Tools

This is information about the testing and creation tools that I am leveraging to control this process. Note that none of these tools alone can satisfy 100% of what is required per this method; however by combining functionality of a number of tools 100% of the desired valadation requirements can be met. No software can satisfy the 'self-service' requirement (i.e. all tasks must be completeable by the typical accountant with less than one day of training).

• Pesseract (Comprehensive, robust working proof of concept for verifying reports, no creation capabilities)
• Pacioli (Commercial platform being created, currently in ALPHA, currently no GUI but does support report creation)
• XBRL Cloud (Commercially available software for verifying reports, no creation capabilities)
• XBRL Query (Commercially available software for verifying reports, don't understand the creation capabilities, not currently usable by business professionals)
• Luca (Working proof of concept used for XBRL-based financial report creation per my method)

Logical Theory Describing Financial Report

This is information about the underlying human readable and machine readable logical theory that provides the underlying foundation for achieving all of the above.

• Logical Theory Describing Financial Report, human readable narrative useful to accounting professionals who want to understand details
• Logical Theory Describing Financial Report, details of the model useful for software engineers
• Logical Model Metadata, machine readable
• Logical Model Arcroles, used to define associations between model terms
• Understanding the Financial Report Logical System, video playlist about 2 hours long
• Mastering XBRL-based Digital Financial Reporting, best summary of all information that I have been able to put together, about 700 pages