What Precious Metal is YOUR Data?

Gold standard...Golden idea...Golden ticket.

Despite what the market says on any given day, verbally, gold is the entity that is most closely associated with those things being of the highest quality.

This is why, in the world of financial services companies, data that is this stored in the Security and Exchange Commission's EDGAR database is considered the "golden" data set because it is pure with 0% chance of content changes.

As the entire industry continues to move towards XBRL for electronic communication of financial and business data, the idea of this "golden" data set becomes more important. A company that is choosing a vendor to work with on their XBRL transition should be asking how and from where their data is being drawn to be tagged. The more moves it makes from non-EDGAR sources (through content management software, composition systems, etc.), the greater the chances that edits could be made to the information at some point during the workflow, and when working with XBRL, the most up-to-date version of the content has to be used.

So, while chromium, strontium and osmium are all fine elements on the periodic table, it is their fellow metal gold that needs to be the word to describe the data from your company that is utilized in the XBRL process.