This Week in XBRL: What Makes an XBRL Expert?

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.

The Global XBRL Team at Ernst & Young is looking for an XBRL specialist. We already have a job, but we thought it would be interesting to see what qualifications are required for the lofty title of ‘XBRL Specialist.’ The job posting begins with the kind of language one would expect:

Candidates for this role need a real enthusiasm for the technical aspects of financial reporting. They should be able to communicate fluently, both written and verbal, to audiences in accountancy circles.

After that, the group gets a little more specific.

The role:

Internationally focused

IFRS-focused XBRL Taxonomy design and review

Tagging of model IFRS financial statements

Analysing and consuming data from IFRS statements in XBRL

Writing and testing business rules

Evaluating software

Training and supporting clients required to report their IFRS financial statements in XBRL

Supporting the IASB, EBA and related international working groups.

What you will need:

A degree educated candidate, achieving 2:1 or above

Qualified accountant (ACA or CIMA) with good exam record

Experience working on the production of statutory accounts in IFRS

Flexibility for frequent international travel

Real technical facilitation experience - advantageous

A real enthusiasm for information technology

Broad experience applied in problem solving

Highly PC literate, with a knowledge of MS-Excel & Word

Assertive and proactive approach to the delivery/implementation of projects

Demonstrable project management experience a real advantage

Real technical facilitation experience an advantage

Strong communication skills written and verbal, communicating at all levels, in a clear, concise and fluent manner as dictated by the needs of the audience.

Intimidated? One thing you may notice with a second look is that very few of these requirements involve XBRL. One would assume that a job posting for an XBRL specialist would ask for someone to be a specialist in XBRL! Perhaps there is a reason for this oversight. Perhaps, XBRL isn’t that complicated after all.

FierceComplianceIT.com has collated a list of ten tips for anyone wanting to be an XBRL expert. The most important tip is number 4.

Recognize that XBRL is simply a different way of expressing the same financial information. - The SEC, HTML and XBRL filing formats are two different mediums for expressing exactly the same information. With the XBRL format, however, you can use automated computer processes to check that information ticks and ties correctly.

XBRL can be a daunting language to approach blindly, and the year two requirements have many companies and consultants scratching their heads. With a little research, a little help, and a little planning, you can breeze through your XBRL filing this year.

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Merrill Corporation is proud to offer XBRL Complete, a suite of services that meets - and has options to exceed – the mandated requirements for XBRL for mutual funds. For more information, please click here or call 866-367-9110.

This Week in XBRL: Registration Statements

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.

For the financial industry, the eccentricities of XBRL are well known. However, as pointed out in this Dodd-Frank.com article, most of those issues are associated with second quarter form 10-Qs. As it turns out, the confusion only increases when it comes to registration statements.

About the only thing that may be perfectly clear is XBRL exhibits are not needed for an initial public offering. Even to arrive at that conclusion requires a tortured reading of Regulation S-K Rule 601(b)(101) and the statement “first is required for a periodic report on Form 10-Q.”  Obviously if an issuer is doing an IPO they have never filed a 10-Q.

Confused yet? How about this: according to the written regulations, XBRL is only required for a registration statement that includes a “price or price range.” However, as Jill Radloff points out:

That is almost never the case for a resale registration statement so one may be tempted to conclude XBRL exhibits are not necessary.  We believe the SEC takes the opposite position.  The reasoning is the securities have already been sold, a price has been determined, and therefore the registration statement must include XBRL exhibits.

Radloff’s article goes into great detail about a number of other tricky steps in this process for both form 10-Qs and form S-1s. We have also described a number of the regulations that must be kept in mind in previous blog posts.

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Merrill Corporation is proud to offer XBRL Complete, a suite of services that meets - and has options to exceed – the mandated requirements for XBRL for mutual funds. For more information, please click here or call 866-367-9110.

This Week in XBRL: Improving Quality of Submissions

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.

To continue our discussion on feedback on the XBRL filings already submitted to the SEC, we found a very good piece by Brad Monterio, the chairperson of the XBRL Committe of the Institute of Management Accountants, sharing his thoughts on the initial filings and suggestions moving forward. His points as far as improving quality were particularly notable:

We all remember Ford Motor Company’s slogan – the same applies to XBRL filings. Granted, the SEC has modified the liability provisions that will not penalize companies for errors in their XBRL filings until after October 31, 2014, but why wait to make sure everything is accurate and high quality? Set top quality standards for your XBRL documents from day one. Regardless of the moratorium on errors, the SEC, and the rest of the market for that matter, is watching nonetheless.

How can you improve the quality of your XBRL submissions?

1. Be diligent in your tag selections. This is one of the most important parts of the workflow. The SEC has published interpretive guidance at http://XBRL.sec.gov that can help you in selecting the right tags. Software applications for XBRL data conversion available today also include interfaces that help you select the appropriate tags from the U.S. GAAP XBRL taxonomy. Make sure that whichever application you use, the latest XBRL taxonomy is being used.

2. It’s preview time. Take advantage of the free viewer available on the SEC website to see what your filing will look like. This will help to identify potential problems before submission. Several commercially available viewers are also available in the market.

3. Validate, validate, validate. In addition to selecting the correct tags, you need to ensure that your submission is technically valid. Errors in filings are already being watched – don’t become another statistic. Use a validation engine from one of the software providers or the one available from the SEC in its test-filing tool.

4. Don’t be negative. Understand the differences between the HTML rendering of your filing and the actual XBRL documents. A common problem plaguing filers in the past is the inclusion of negative vales in the filing. Although some values may be shown as a negative item in a rendered version of the data (e.g., revenue may be shown as a negative number on the printed page), in many cases that item should not be shown as a negative vale in the XBRL document. See the SEC staff observations for some guidance on this issue.

5. Thoroughness is next to godliness. As year-two requirements come into play for you (i.e., detailed footnote tagging) or as you review subscripted text areas in financial statement disclosures, make sure you are complete and thorough in tagging all items. Monetary values, percentages and other types of numbers expressed in the statements need be tagged in both string form and as amounts. For example, a fraction (“one-third”) or a ratio (“four to one”) must be tagged appropriately.

Beyond Mr. Monterio's thoughts on quality, his statement regarding timeliness of troubleshooting will hopefully not fall on deaf ears for those companies not immediately worried about fixing potential errors.

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Merrill Corporation is proud to offer XBRL Complete, a suite of services that meets - and has options to exceed – the mandated requirements for XBRL for mutual funds. For more information, please click here or call 866-367-9110.

This Week in XBRL: Is XBRL Complementary, but Secondary?

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.

In our post last week, we discussed the fact that some are questioning whether learning XBRL will be worth it when it comes to the SEC mandate to tag filed financial information.

One of the reasons the question is being asked is because some of the more respected organizations throughout the world are classifying the reporting language in a confusing way. For example, this week, the International Financial Reporting Standards Foundation released a statement regarding XBRL taxonomy:

But "nearly all" of the participants cautioned against the foundation's recommendation that XBRL, or eXtensible Business Reporting Language, be integrated into the formal standard-setting process.

Instead, XBRL should be viewed as a "complementary, but secondary activity, that should not impair the ability of the IASB to make the necessary standard-setting decisions", the minutes state.

The SEC has made it clear that that XBRL is the wave of the future, but are others unwilling to take that step at this point?

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Merrill Corporation is proud to offer XBRL Complete, a suite of services that meets - and has options to exceed – the mandated requirements for XBRL for mutual funds. For more information, please click here or call 866-367-9110.