Comply With XBRL: Automate Compliance With U.S. and European Financial-Reporting Standards

Compliance is mandatory, but the process of preparing compliant documents is not. Doing the right thing wrong, can result in the very same deficiencies that XBRL intends to eliminate.

The XBRL standardization initiative requires that all terms in financial reports be submitted in an approved taxonomy so comparable terms are used across different companies. This paper discusses the pitfalls of using manual steps that are currently common for transposing financial documents into compatible XBRL files, looks at the advantages of substituting an automatic process using WebFOCUS, and illustrates that process.