How to Avoid Common Errors in SEC Filings

The SEC filings are coming in and there has been some opportunity to analyze them. Charles Hoffman has posted a new entry on his blog that provides a summary of the most common errors and how to avoid them. Take a look.

Bowne & Co

XBRL Canada has several members with world class skills and experience with XBRL regulatory filings. Bowne & Co is one of those members.

This article represents the first in a series featuring individual XBRL members. The intent is to provide some idea of the kind of help that is available for companies that are faced with the prospect of needing to file in XBRL this year or over the next few years.

Bowne & Co got into the XBRL world early and was the first to file with the SEC Voluntary program when it started. They offer XBRL filing and consulting services and their website contains a useful introduction to XBRL as well as a repository of a number of useful tools. For example, the site contains a free Interactive XBRL Viewer, which will enable companies to upload their filings and then view them as they will appear on the SEC site. Their Compliance Driver is an automated external reporting solution that simplifies the creation of compliance documents, integrates XBRL tagging and IFRS conversion into the process and reduces the risks that often occur with external reporting.

A corporate blog, managed by renowned XBRL expert Rob Blake, sets out some of the latest events on XBRL including notice of the many webinars held by Bowne.

Keep an eye out for future articles on XBRL Canada members.

Learning About XBRL

Want to learn a bit about XBRL? Try some of these sites:

KPMG offers a good tutorial on the basics
Bowne & Co has another one online that emphasizes preparing good regulatory filings
RR Donnelley and Edgar Online have put up another excellent site on SEC Filings called Try XBRL.
The Journal of Accountancy has an online tagging tutorial using slides on tagging XBRL documents.
To learn about rendering, try this slide deck from XBRL International
For the more technically minded, try this on the XBRL Specification
And for numerous links to articles and educational materials on XBRL, try this site from Bryant University.

Happy Learning

How Not to Lose the Momentum
by Gerald Trites

This year, in Canada, XBRL has been pushed to the sidelines until IFRS implementation is complete. This is unfortunate because it will put us further behind other countries than we already are. There is increasing evidence that global capital markets are embracing XBRL and that countries like Canada, because of the importance of information availability, will be at an increasing disadvantage in raising capital in those markets.

It is also unfortunate because it is based on the mistaken belief that XBRL implementation is a project that is, or almost is, as big as IFRS implementation. This is simply wrong. The two are not even in the same league. IFRS implementation for many, if not most, companies is a massive project. XBRL implementation by comparison is small. David Blazskouske, Director of the Office of Interactive Data for the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) spoke last week at the XBRL Canada Annual Conference. He, along with others having experience with regulatory filings, pointed out that XBRL implementations are not large projects, that they consume resources measured in weeks, unlike IFRS projects which take larger teams many, many months. Usually XBRL projects only require a small team of accountants to implement and with minimal training.

Because Canadian companies are immersed in IFRS convergence, they have their teams in place. It is interesting to note that the teams required to implement IFRS are similar in composition to those required for XBRL - accountants. We have written before of the advantages to companies of implementing IFRS and XBRL at the same time. The similarity in accounting skills required simply means economies of scale in making good use of those teams. If management does not wish to take this approach, then the next best approach is to retain the accounting team that was built for IFRS and use that team, with perhaps a bit of tweaking, to implement XBRL. This way, the momentum gained through IFRS implementation can be transported into the project to implement XBRL. It's a project that will need to be done in any event - we know that - and the core of a good XBRL implementation team is already in place. So why not use it?

The presentations for the XBRL Annual Conference are on the XBRL Canada website.

Annual XBRL Canada Conference

The annual conference was held yesterday in Toronto and it was a successful and high quality event. An interested audience posed good questions to the panellists, leading to some stimulating discussion. The presentations are now on the XBRL Canada website and are available for download.

Thompson Reuters files in XBRL

Thompson Reuters Corporation has filed their interim financials on SEDAR in XBRL. The company filed their unaudited consolidated financial statements for the period ended June 30, 2009 in XBRL under the Canadian Securities Administrators’ Voluntary Filing Program. They filed using the 2009 IFRS taxonomy. They are the largest company to file under the voluntary program to date and also the first to file using IFRS. The XBRL files can be viewed at this link.