“XBRL … financial statement data collection less costly and more accurate.”
Jo Guo, Head of Fundamentals, Equity Data Operations, Morningstar investment research October 8, 2015
CFA Institute interview on Policy Perspectives – XBRL
No Autoplay
Glenn Doggett, Director, Standards of Practice, CFA Institute
May 28, 2013
“XBRL data is more cost effective for end users: …” (read more)
“…computer-readable content is considerably less expensive to work with, and faster to make available to investors, than data that must be rekeyed and validated. More timely and less expensive corporate data benefits not just the investor but also the public companies themselves – in the form of lower cost of capital. Our investor clients require increasingly more granular data, analyzing and investing in companies that are open and transparent.”
Excerpt of letter from Thomson Reuters to members of Congress
March and September 2014
“Without XBRL, corporate financial data literally must be ‘created’ …” (read more)
“Calcbench is a new entry in the market for corporate data made possible by the availability of free, computer-readable data in the SEC’s EDGAR system. Without XBRL, corporate financial data literally must be “created” by individuals scraping HTML filings, rekeying and validating the data. Because XBRL data is computer-readable with predefined concepts, our data offering can be made available to our buy- and sell-side clients more quickly and much more cheaply. That said, we still normalize and scrub the XBRL data. Normalization is to be expected as there are often multiple concepts that a public company can choose from when tagging a single item. But we also have found a lot of inconsistency in the way issuers are selecting tags, assigning negative and positive signs, combining elements, and creating dimensions (XBRL tables), among other problems. Because there is limited guidance available to issuers, and because of the complexity of the US GAAP Taxonomy, we often see facts reported very differently from company to company. Working with XBRL data is significantly better than starting with untagged HTML data, but the cost is higher than it should be, given the additional checking and clean up we’re required to perform on the data before we can make it available to end users.”
Alex Rapp, co-Founder, Calcbench
October 30, 2014
“XBRL filings and data allow us to more efficiently monitor key accounts, trends, and metrics …” (read more)
“…using automated screening where we previously had to pull these data sources manually. Given our role in helping clients identify aggressive accounting practices, XBRL allows us to monitor footnote disclosures of key company estimates and assumptions using quantitative tools and techniques that were previously unavailable. By saving us time in our analysis, XBRL allows us to provide more timely feedback to our clients and help them avoid investing in companies that may be employing aggressive accounting techniques.”
Dan Mahoney, CFA, CPA, Director of Research, Center for Financial Research Analysis (CFRA)
