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Business Reporting With XBRL


UBmatrix scales up XBRL-based solutions

By David Worthington
July 24, 2007 — 
Generating business and financial data is easy, but distributing it to be repurposed while keeping it tightly coupled with its context and meaning can be a challenge. With compliance requirements increasing, governments and organizations are eying XBRL, the XML-based Extensible Business Reporting Language, as a solution, while companies such as UBmatrix are creating tools that work with the emerging standard.

UBmatrix released the latest versions of its XBRL solutions on July 24, which together form a platform to prepare, publish, validate, exchange and analyze business and financial data. The principal products include UBmatrix Processing Engine, UBmatrix Report Builder and UBmatrix Enterprise Application Suite.

XBRL is a method of defining and exchanging business and financial performance information, and is governed by the not-for-profit international consortium XBRL International. Both the Committee of European Banking Supervisors and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) in the United States have adopted XBRL as a standard for bank reporting, and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is piloting XBRL statement filings.

A recent survey by accounting consultants Grant Thornton International indicated that 51 percent of chief financial officers responding expected that XBRL would soon become the mandatory format for SEC filings.

The core technology of UBmatrix’s solution is the XBRL processing engine. Version 3.1 of the engine executes XBRL code in a fashion similar to the way a database engine executes SQL. The updated engine supports multithreading and streaming to help increase throughput and allows the use of formulas, in anticipation of XBRL’s standardization.

Sunir Kapoor, president and chief executive officer of UBmatrix, claimed that one of the core benefits of XBRL is that its data model can be changed at runtime. “There is an assembly trend in software development toward higher-level scripting done by the business users themselves. They rake in existing information and modify it,” he explained.

UBmatrix Report Builder Microsoft Office Edition 2.1 integrates with Microsoft’s Excel to provide a desktop tool for creating, modifying, populating and validating XBRL documents. Users have the option to either assemble data using Excel’s interface or populate a spreadsheet programmatically via the Report Builder API. It is also designed to operate with automatic and manual workflows.

Other additions to Report Builder 2.1 include a built-in instance editor, improved XBRL mapping and a simplified way to create rule templates and map existing Excel spreadsheets.

UBmatrix also updated its server-based suite for the deployment of enterprise XBRL-based reporting applications. Enterprise Application Suite 3.5 includes new versions of Taxonomy Manager, Reporting Manager and administrative tools designed to exert more control over reporting workflows.

The suite also integrates with desktop development and deployment tools, Taxonomy Designer and Report Builder. Users have the ability to prequalify report submissions and manage the relationship between submitters and analysts.

“The growing adoption of XBRL for regulatory reporting is spurring startups to create a new generation of financial reporting tools,” wrote Gartner research director Neil Chandler, in the report “Cool Vendors in Finance and HCM, 2007.”

“XBRL reporting will drastically reduce the time required to produce detailed and standardized internal and external financial reports, resulting in increased transparency, report production cost savings, and greater confidence in reporting accuracy and regulatory compliance,” Chandler concluded.

Although regulatory concerns are driving the immediate implementations of XBRL, there may be broader roles for it down the road. UBmatrix’s Kapoor said that XBRL’s usefulness is not limited to financial reporting; rather, it’s suitable for any bidirectional exchange of data, because it provides a standard way to tag information in any industry domain and facilitates its exchange.


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