Mar 20

eXtensible Business Reporting Language. Part 4: XBRL example

by David Harper, CFA, FRM, CIPM

CFA |

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We continue to highlight concepts from our screencast An Introduction to XBRL. The screencast earns 0.5 credit hours under the Professional Development (PD) program at CFA Institute.

Xbrl_interactiveData

In the previous three posts, we introduced XBRL:

  • CONTEXT. The traditional financial reporting supply chain is lumpy (i.e., investor gets periodic updates), error-prone, and paper-based
  • PROMISE. In theory, XBRL gets us nearer to the holy grail of dynamic transparent financial reporting, with three key benefits: 1. real-time data (less lag between transaction and report), 2. error-free (no transcription from document to spreadsheet) data, and 3. structured data (not loose-leaf collections) financial data. Note how benefits map to problems: real-time solves lumpy problem, eliminating transcription solves the error problem, and structured data solves the paper problem.
  • CONCEPT. Following other industries, XBRL International oversees the development of an open standard that is a version of eXtensible Markup Language (XML). Taxonomies (i.e., dictionaries) define which tags to use for which data items. Financial data items are tagged (wrapped in tags), which allows the data to be manipulated and shared.

 

A simple example

In the screencast, we use I-Metrix published by EDGAR Online (Ticker:EDGR) to retrieve three data items directly from Microsoft Excel. I-Metrix is a powerful tool for retrieving XBRL-tagged data.

We simply entered the following function into a spreadsheet cell:

=imetrix("MSFT","STD","usfr-pte:CashCashEquivalents","Q","FY","FQ")

 

The first advantage is that we have simply used an Excel function call, just like a SUM or VLOOKUP function. We need to give I-Metrix a few parameters. First, the ticker of the company; in this case MSFT is the ticker for Microsoft.

Next, "STD" represents the standardized XBRL dataset; it retrieves data mapped to the associated XBRL taxonomy. (Remember the taxonomy is just the dictionary).

Next, ,"usfr-pte:CashCashEquivalents" is the XBRL field. This is the key XBRL reference. It has two parts, separated by a colon (:). The first part ("usfr-pte") is the namespace prefix (more below). The second part ("CashCashEquivalents") is the field itself. The field must correspond to an entry in the taxonomy, so that everyone can agree. In this case, the field called CashCashEquivalents signifies the cash account (a current asset) on the balance sheet.

The final three parameters tell I-Metrix about the periodicity; i.e., which historical item to retrieve. I-Metrix impressively goes back five years. We can get specific quarterly or annual data, by calendar or fiscal period. In the example above, we merely request the most recent fiscal quarter.

In summary, we have requested the cash balance ("CashCashEquivalents") for Microsoft (MSFT) as of the last reported fiscal quarter. The function returns the number into the spreadsheet immediately!

And now you understand the basics of XBRL.

The namespace prefix

 

Xbrl_namespace

The first part of the XBRL field is the namespace. In our example, it is "usfr-pte." Remember in a previous post, we talked about taxonomies. There are many taxonomies. For example, Chinese institutions will use a different taxonomy than U.S. institutions. And within U.S. institutions, there are different sets of reports. So, we need to point to the relevant taxonomy. In this case, "usfr-pte" refers to the taxonomy (dictionary) that contains the definitions for the primary elements of U.S. Financial Reports. If we were instead pulling from a mutual fund, pension or insurance company, we would point to a different taxonomy.

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