IASC Foundation XBRL Update

XBRL · Tags: IFRS, XBRL

A few days ago the IASC Foundation released its quarterly (from now on) XBRL Update, a newsletter that covers XBRL activities related to IFRS. In the section reserved to Canada the newsletter features the Convergence Assistant (CA), a joint effort between the Canadian XBRL Jurisdiction, the XBRL Global Ledger Working Group and Iphix to provide a tool to facilitate the transition from Canadian GAAP to IFRS for Canadian businesses.

The CA is a free Web application that showcases the value of XBRL’s Global Ledger; you can upload a trial balance in text or XBRL GL format, and then create XBRL GL, multi-GAAP and IFRS XBRL instances based on predefined mappings between a Standard Chart of Accounts and the relevant XBRL taxonomies - in this particular version the Canadian GAAP and IFRS taxonomies, but the tool supports any XBRL taxonomy, including taxonomies for internal reporting . The XBRL instances can then be downloaded and used as desired.

The CA also includes a user interface to drill back down from the financial statements to the underlying trial balance detail, and to automatically reconcile different “views” of the financials based on different XBRL taxonomies. The use of the CA is free; sample data is also provided to test its functionalities.

March 19, 2009 by Gianluca Garbellotto