Bob Schneider is a Partner in 
Wilson So is the Director of Hitachi America, Ltd. Book Review: Interactive Data — Building XBRL Into Accounting Information Systems
Written by Bob Schneider Posted November 17, 2007
As a quick search on Amazon reveals, books about XBRL remain few and far between. Books on interactive data for the general business reader are especially scarce. Interactive Data — Building XBRL Into Accounting Information Systems, recently published by The Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants, is thus a most welcome addition to the literature.
Principal author Gerald Trites and his advisory group (I’ll collectively refer to them as “Trites”) cover a great deal of territory in this 100-page book, including:
The rationale for XBRL vis–vis the business reporting supply chain;
The business case for interactive data for various groups of users;
A short introduction to instance document preparation;
A “best practices” approach to XBRL adoption;
Ten case studies of interactive data implementations, including Microsoft, Statscan, Bank of Spain, etc..
The writing is excellent and easily accessible to the general business reader. The charts and tables are well conceived, helping convey information quickly and easily.
My favorite chapter was Deep Tagging and its Implications. Here Trites focuses on the various IT architectures seen in organizations and the implications of those architectures on the tagging methods used. Trites presents a hierarchy of IT infrastructure with five levels:
User (user terminals)
Data Delivery (reports, spreadsheets)
Application Integration (data warehouses, intergration tools)
Applications (legacy systems; ERP, CRM, procurement, etc.; reporting tools )
Data (database systems, flat files)
Trites discusses the various issues that tagging raises for each, and how tagging at one level affects others levels. The book describes the benefits of tagging for data reuse, internal management reporting, and systems integration. At the same, time, Trites studiously avoids a rah-rah tone, noting the complexity of tagging and its implications for business processes.
One thing that struck me while reading the chapter on instance documents is the difficulty of convincing even sophisticated readers that XBRL makes business reporting simpler when it looks so complicated. Trites presents the left-hand side of Adobe Systems’s balance sheet and shows how the various assets would be represented in XBRL. For example, Other Receivables as of December 2, 2005, of 31,504 ($ thousands) becomes:
<usfr-pte:OtherReceiveablesNet decimals=”-3″ contextRef=”AsOf20051202_Consol_Unaudited”
unitRef=”USD”>31504000</usfr-pte:OtherReceivablesNet>
The reader is immediately confronted with the arcane abbreviation usfr-pte (i.e., US financial reporting primary terms element) and it doesn’t get much simpler from there.
Admitting more complexity into data to make it better and easier for users is not unusual. Relational database designers add artificial primary keys to their tables; these contain meaningless numbers that nevertheless are vital to ensuring data integrity. But for the unsuspecting user, the wisdom of such additions is not always apparent.
None of this, of course, in any way diminishes Trites’s achievement in providing readers with an outstanding introduction to XBRL — one they can finish on an airplane ride from New York to Atlanta. You can learn how to order the book here.
A few disclosures: Gerald Trites has written kindly about Data Interactive on two occasions at the XBRL Canada blog, to which I have contributed a guest article. Among the case studies described in the book is the Wacoal Accounting Re-engineering Project, for which Hitachi provided products and services. The URL of Data Interactive is given in a footnote to a sentence that comments favorably on XBRL blogs.