This Week in XBRL: Lessons Learned by the SEC

In a continued effort to educate on the development of XBRL technology in industries such as financial services (and beyond), Merrill Corporation will share articles and columns published on the topic.

This week, Accounting Today provided an excellent summary of the SEC's phase-in approach with the XBRL mandate and some of the lessons learned. It is a topic we have covered a number of times on this blog, but this is a quick, concise refresher:

• Data Quality – At the core of the XBRL tagging process, selecting the best tags to represent the information in your financial statements is the most critical part of the process. Carefully selecting the best tags is likely to be the greatest contributor to the quality of an XBRL submission. Some tips on how to select the best tags can be found in the Interpretive Guidance section.
• Viewing Submissions – The SEC’s free previewer allows filers to view their submission before filing to see what it will look like on the SEC’s website. However, this rendering of the XBRL submission will NOT exactly visually match the corresponding HTML submission, and there is no requirement for it to do so. Filers should NOT make changes to their tagged data solely to achieve a particular visual effect. The previewer may be one of the tools used to help verify the completeness of the XBRL submission, but relying solely on the rendered document to review the tagged data will not identify all of the details necessary to assess potential filing errors. The filer’s software vendor or service provider may be able to provide reports that will help review these other aspects of your submission, including validation results.
• Validation – Although selecting the correct tags is the most critical aspect of the process, if the XBRL submission is not technically valid it will not be accepted by the EDGAR system. The SEC said filers should consider using the validation tools from their vendor and the SEC test filing mechanism to make sure their submission is technically valid before filing.

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