Financial Reporting Updates
Bob Jensen at Trinity University
Online Financial Reporting
Online Financial Services
XBRL --- Capture the Excitement
"Finally, Business Talks the Same Language," by Stanley Zarowin and Wayne E. Harding, Journal of Accountancy, August 2000 --- http://www.aicpa.org/pubs/jofa/aug2000/zarowin.htm
- XBRL, EXTENSIBLE BUSINESS REPORTING LANGUAGE, soon will be the lingua franca for all business reporting—from issuing financial statements to banks and shareholders to filing 10-Ks with the SEC or uploading business information onto a Web site. The development surely will revolutionize how business information is reported, used and calculated.
- THE SOFTWARE WILL BE built into most, if not all, accounting and financial reporting software.
- ONCE ADDED TO THE SOFTWARE, it will automatically and transparently translate all the business information you choose—numbers and words—so each segment of data is identified when viewed by a Web browser or sent to a spreadsheet application for calculation or examination.
- XBRL IS GOING TO MAKE the work of financial managers easier and more effective because it will improve access to and the usability of business data no matter whether the information is from a business or an association or whether the entity is large or small, public, private or nonprofit.
- ADDITIONALLY, XBRL WILL reduce the cost of processing, calculating and formatting financial information because, once it’s created and formatted the first time, it never has to be keyed in a second time or reformatted for even special presentations.
- THE BOTTOM LINE IS THAT XBRL will expand professional opportunities for CPAs and other financial executives and add value to financial information for all users: auditors, preparers, bankers, shareholders—in short, anyone who creates or accesses an organization’s business data.
- THE OTHER GOOD NEWS IS THAT XBRL is free, even though many developers are investing a great deal of money on the work.
You can read my threads on XBRL and XML at
Online Financial Reporting
Ross A Kaplan, "Identity Crisis for Online Annual Reporting," Financial Executive, Jul/Aug 1999, 38-39.
More that 70 publicly traded companies now make their quarterly conference calls available using streaming audio or video.
The number of companies using the web to make their annual shareholders meetings available is likely to treble to about 100 this annual-meeting season.
Four of the top 25 investor-relations web sites are based outside the United States, according to Ross Kaplan; 13 of these offer at least some investor-relations content in more than one language.
Five of the top sites present financial information in more than one currency.
As the underlying technology improves, good investor-relations web sites will go beyond simply informing shareholders and increasingly let them do things -- for example, calculate ROI and other ratios, vote their shares, enroll in a dividend reinvestment plan and generate graphics showing trends in operating results.
Increasing "customizability" means that shareholders will be able to configure web sties to show only the information they're interested in -- bypassing the vast majority of web content (sales material, technical support, etc.) aimed at other audiences.
Have traditional accounting and finance measures of corporate wealth "lost their
Utility?"
http://www.zdnet.com/pcweek/stories/columns/0,4351,407222,00.html
Online Financial Services