Creating XBRL Instance Documents in Excel

CPA Journal, The, Jul 2007 by Mahoney, Lois S, White, Clinton Jr

If it isn't part of an accountant's vocabulary yet, XBRL (extensible business reporting language) is sure to be soon. The FDIC requires banks to file their quarterly call reports using XBRL-compliant documents. The sec encourages registrants to report their financial information using XBRL and is updating its EDGAR system to handle XBRL filings and to support "interactive" data access and analysis.

Creating XBRL documents can be tedious and error-prone if done manually. Fortunately, software tools are continually being developed and improved to help make the creation of valid XBRL documents easier. For a list of available XBRL software, visit XBRL International at www.xbrl.orgnOols/.

Rivet Software, Inc.'s Dragon Tag and Dragon View (www.rivetsoftware.com) are a simple solution for tagging existing financial information. Dragon Tag and Dragon View are both add-in packages for Microsoft Excel and Word. Dragon Tag facilitates tagging financial information to create XBRL instance documents, review the results, validate the XBRL instance documents, and render them as webpages. Dragon View allows viewing of XBRL instance documents without knowledge of XBRL. (All XBRL documents are referred to as "instance" documents because they are an instance of the documents defined in the XBRL specification.) The AICPA started promoting Dragon Tag and Dragon View in 2006.

This article demonstrates the use of Dragon Tag to prepare a valid XBRL partial balance sheet for commercial and industrial companies following U.S. GAAP. Users can download a 30-day free copy (the regular cost is $995 per user) of Rivet Dragon Tag follow the exercise in this article, and create a partial balance sheet. (Note that coauthor Lois S. Mahoney uses her name for the example.)

Downloads

The first step is to go to Rivet Software's site, www.rivet software.com, and download Dragon Tag 2006 (30-day free trial), along with the installation instructions. Once you install the software, click on "Start Excel with Dragon Tag Add-in" and the Dragon Tag toolbar will appear in Excel.

The next step is downloading U.S. GAAP taxonomy for commercial and industrial companies (USGCI). The USGCI taxonomy is a suite of files that defines the agreed-upon, standard account tags (names) to be used for reporting information in computerized financial statements and the ways in which accounts are grouped together for subtotals, totals, and presentation. These files need to be downloaded from the XBRL International website in order to assure proper referencing and validation when building the XBRL instance document.

The XBRL International website has approved taxonomies for different financial reporting entities and for particular industry sectors (www.xbrl.org/FRTA pproved/). To demonstrate a commercial company, follow the link for U.S. GAAP-Commercial and Industrial (www.xbrl.org/us/fr/gaap/ci/2005-02-28/ us-gaap-ci Summary Page.htm).

Scroll down to the "All DTS files" and click on "ZIP" to download the suite of files. In this example, we will download the Zip file to the root drive and unzip or extract the archive (it can be saved anywhere, but make a note of the location). Later in the example, you will need the file "us-gaap-ci-2005-02-28.xsd" in the unzipped directory C:\2005-02-28 CI DTS\us\fr\gaap\ci\2005-02-28V

Develop the Spreadsheet

The next step is to create a Word or Excel document that contains the financial statement information that will be transformed into an XBRL instance document. Exhibit 1 shows a partial balance sheet for a fictitious company named White Incorporated, developed by the authors in Excel for this demonstration. Using Dragon Tag, we will tag the account values in the balance column with the appropriate XBRL tags and create a valid XBRL partial balance sheet instance document in accordance with U.S. GAAP.

Develop an Entity Profile

The first step in using Dragon Tag is to establish an entity profile. An entity profile contains the name, ID, and website of the reporting company, along with the default reporting currency and the taxonomy to be used. To start the Entity Profile, click on the "Entity Profiles" button on the Dragon Tag toolbar. The Entity Profile dialog box will now appear.

Next, click on the "Create New Entities" icon to create and name a new entity (Exhibit 2). First, enter the name of the company, White Incorporated, in the "Name" field. Next, complete the "Unique ID and Scheme" section. For ID, choose the unique ID that you normally use for outside reporting, such as a federal tax ID or stock exchange ID. Enter your company's website address in the URL text box. For this example, enter "WI" in the ID field for White Incorporated and "www.whiteincorpoated.com/xbrl" for the URL. From the "Default Currency" menu, choose "USD United States Dollar." Finally, go to the "Default Taxonomy" field and click on the "Browse" button. The "Open Taxonomy File" dialog box should appear. At this point, Dragon Tag expects you to navigate to and open the schema file that you previously downloaded. Navigate to its location on your hard drive (in this example, it should be in the folder C:\2005-02-28 CI DTS\us\fr\gaap\ci\2005-02-28\), click "us-gaap-ci-2005-02-28.xsd" (.xsd identifies it as a XML schema file), and open the file. At this point, the "Entity Profile" dialog box should look like Exhibit 3. Notice the green hexagon now under the browse button, which indicates that the schema file has been properly installed. Also notice how the Name, Description, Language, Label Role, and View Type fields are automatically populated. The final step is to click the "Save Entity" icon in the upper left-hand corner and close the Entity Profiles dialog box.