Since 2009, financial statements submitted by US companies to the SEC, in US GAAP, are available as “interactive data” i.e. in XBRL language with the promise: “Any investor with a computer and an internet connection will have the ability to acquire and download interactive financial data that have generally been available only to large institutional users.”
Why, such large quantities of numeric data, coded in a generic language, have not yet reached the vast majority of users?
The primary interest of users is financial analysis and one of the pre-requisite for analyzing historical financial data is comparability.
Can XBRL data been used for financial analysis without re-keying and re-formatting in a database?
A Case study based on US GAAP Financial Statements submitted in XBRL to the SEC by a selection of largest US Manufacturing companies for fiscal year 2010.
Read the full paper here: https://etxetera.sharepoint.com/Documents/Forms/AllItems.aspx?id=%2FDocuments%2FWPUSGAAP%2Epdf&parent=%2FDocuments
