Digital+Financial+Reporting

=Digital Financial Reporting= The term **digital financial reporting** or **21st century financial reporting** or **model based financial reporting** or **structured authoring** or **semantic structured authoring** is the same as financial reporting as practiced in the past, only achieved leveraging technologies such as XBRL, RDF/OWL, RSS, and other semantic web types of technologies. Rather than using a "document" based or "paper" based approach, an approach which leverages technologies is used, and then the documents or "paper" based reports are generated from the digital financial report. (Meta data: RDF/OWL Ontology)

Relations between the components is documented here.

Follow the //Digital Financial Reporting// discussion on LinkedIn for more information.

Prototype Digital Financial Report Viewers
Here are a number of digital financial report viewer software applications:
 * Firefox XBRL Viewer add on (you need to have the Firefox browser): See here, and here for information.
 * Digital Financial Report Viewer that looks and works like iTunes (these are different options for viewing the same thing): View as HTML page, View as Flash Video, View using Screencast.com

Understanding Digital Financial Reports
Today, financial statements are documents created in Microsoft Word many times (85% of all financial statments are created using Word). Here is what a financial statement looks like today. If you look through the document it should be familiar to you. It contains all the components of a financial statement.

Imagine taking that PDF which came from printing a Word document to PDF and converting each piece of the financial statement into a Microsoft Excel pivot table. In fact, here is precicely that. This PDF rendering was created as an experiment to see what a financial statement might look like if each piece was modeled as a pivot table. Screen shoots of each piece were put into a Word document in the same order of the Word-based financial statement (from the paragraph above). This shows that a financial statement can be seen as lots of little pieces which are organized into a "flow" or sequence or ordering of the information.

Finally, this prototype takes the Excel pivot tables one step further. Rather than reading each pivot table from a Word document, this breaks the financial report into its individual pieces. The pieces are organized (see the left hand side), you click on the name of each piece and that piece shows up on the right. The rendering is not "interactive", meaning you cannot change it like a pivot table. But what if you could. Well, with a real digital financial you will be able to pivot the information. Thus the term "interactive data". **Remember this is a prototype**. The point is to show that a financial report can be broken down into a smaller set of pieces. Each piece can be modeled and used independently of other pieces.

A digital financial report is constructed using the medium XBRL. The XBRL is used to model the informtaion in a structured form, structured for meaning. This popular video shows how XBRL works. It will give you an idea about how XBRL structures information and what that means. For more information on digital financial reporting see here.