The first year of XBRL filing only requires the first level of detail. The next year’s filing will require all four levels of detail – a huge, possibly 10x, increase in tags as revealed in these public comment letters submitted to the SEC.

While grabbing my afternoon cookie and coffee, I ran into our resident accounting expert, Seamus Moran. I asked him if he could elaborate on how Oracle Applications supports XBRL reporting.

As I’m enjoying outstanding Belgian cuisine with the family of a CLOUD, Inc. colleague after a day of meetings about how computer standards can improve the clarity and efficient use of information and provide for more accurate evaluation of the trust that one might place in information, a 500-mile drive south of here the world’s financial leaders are contemplating the future of finance.

There has been a lot of discussion suggesting that if there had been an XBRL taxonomy for MBSs and other CDOs (etc) and a taxonomy for government stimulus spending, that somehow the next crisis can either be averted or reduced – that the lack of transparency was a cause of the last crisis, and will contribute to the next.

From my vantage point in Boston, I prefer to look to an earlier period in Bay State politics, before Scott Brown’s election, for a possible model to deal with the new realities the Obama Administration faces.

This webinar is designed to help companies implement XBRL for SEC reporting and will include key steps, decisions and considerations for implementing XBRL, how to use a taxonomy, how create XBRL-formatted financial statements and lessons learned from SEC filings submitted to date.

Public companies preparing to comply with the mandate to tag their financials in XBRL may have their work cut out for them initially, but it gets easier the second time around, according to recent survey of more than 200 public company executives.

For 20-plus years, I have struggled to learn Japanese. A primary challenge has been to remember some 2,000 characters Japan imported from China. Because they derive from ideograms (ie, graphic symbols of ideas), like many students, I have tried to remember the character by looking for the graphical elements of meaning still present within it.

Eric Cohen and other XBRL-GL evangelists have been advocating the idea of a seamless audit trail for some time now. Potentially there’s a lot of complexity to this idea involving metamodels of ERP data in UML and so on. But I’m a simple person, so I tend to think of the seamless audit trail as a refinement of a basic function of any accounting or financial reporting software package: Drilldown.

Rivet Software, a Denver-based company pioneering the future of global financial communications, announced that Patrick Quinlan has been promoted from President to Chief Executive Officer. Quinlan replaces Mike Rohan, who remains as Chairman, effective immediately.