Written by Bob Schneider     Posted May 18, 2007

XBRL.org recently made available four short presentations that showcase the business uses of XBRL for those who have no technical knowledge of interactive data.

The nice thing about these talks is that they discuss real-world applications that are completely familiar to financial professionals. None is more than ten minutes long, which is both good and bad the brevity is appreciated, but there’s really not enough time for the speaker to expand much on the subject matter. Three of the four were produced by makers of XBRL products (Hitachi not among them), and there’s a bit (not a lot) of promotion for specific offerings.

Whatever their shortcomings, these talks are an excellent resource if you (or your client, customer, students, etc.) want to get a quick idea of what XBRL can actually do. All four are worth your time, but I’ve provided brief synopses below if you want to pick and choose. Before I do that, here’s a couple of tips for getting more out of the presentations:

(1) The slides may appear small in your browser. Click the Zoom Slide command in the upper-right corner for a bigger and better view.

(2) You can easily jump to any slide at any time by clicking the SLIDE BROWSER command in the lower-right corner and choosing from the slide menu.

The Impact of Interactive Data on the Mutual Fund Industry
Last week I gave glowing but justified praise to the XBRL-GL outreach call of Walter Hamscher of Standard Advantage that dealt with XBRL, Compliance, and SOA.  In this talk on interactive data and mutual funds, Walter first enumerates the various stakeholders in the industry investors for certain, but also staff in functions like marketing and compliance. He discusses how each group can use interactive data to accomplish objectives that would otherwise be difficult. Marketers can employ XBRL to maximize revenue by examining the trade-off between sales loads and revenue. Investors benefit from one-click updates to the prospectus that immediately relay vital information. Compliance enjoys the advantages of improved consistency and accuracy. Overall, interactive data increases the confidence of investors and makes them more likely to buy mutual funds.

Internal Budgeting with XBRL
Darren Peterson, Director of Marketing at UBMatrix, demonstrates how XBRL can benefit internal budgeting. Darren takes listeners through a real-world example of a financial advisers group that has autonomous branches but centralized budgeting. Darren offers “before and after XBRL” scenarios and shows how typical Excel tasks like inserting rows and modifying formulas that introduce errors into the system are eliminated when using interactive data.

Full Cycle External Reporting – From Consolidation to Publishing
In this talk, representatives of Cartesis, R.R. Donnelly, and EDGAR Online discuss how their XBRL-enabled products can be used for, respectively, internal consolidation of company data; preparation of that data for filing with government agencies; and the distribution of the filed data to external audiences, including investors and analysts.

Enhancing Financial Workflows with XBRL – From Loan Application to Final Approval
Dianne Mueller of Just Systems discusses the use of XBRL through the complete loan cycle, from the initial collection of data to loan reports. This process improves regulatory compliance, reduces errors, and cuts cost. Dianne shows how XBRL introduces improvements at every stage of the loan delivery process. There’s no re-keying of the data, data is validated at every stage, and an audit trail is in place. The external beneficiaries are the bank’s customers, while internally the loan processing officer, the credit risk analysts, and the senior loan approval officer all gain.

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This entry was posted on Friday, May 18th, 2007 at 5:55 pm and is filed under General, . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.