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XBRL Competition Projects
Students and Faculty in the Accounting and Informations Systems Department at Emporia State University have competed over several years in an academic global competition for an emerging technology called XBRL, hosted by the XBRL Education Center at Bryant University. This information has been summarized and compiled by Allen Walker.
All of these projects got off the ground as result of Dr. Zane Swanson's interest in XBRL and research in this area. Faculty Sponsors generally hand pick outstanding students from Accounting and Information Systems, who collaborate to design proof-of-concept applications. The working applications are no longer available, but you can read through the summaries and find resources here.
What is XBRL? XBRL stands for Extensible Business Reporting Language.
- XBRL is an open standard that uses Extensible Markup Language (XML)-based data tags to describe financial statements for both public and private companies.
- Once XBRL tags are applied to data within financial reports, the data can be quickly shared, published, consumed, and reported without the need to re-key data.
- XBRL has the potential to benefit all members of the business reporting supply chain.
XBRL is being adopted in the United States by the SEC as a standard interchange format for interactive data reporting. More information about XBRL can be found at www.xbrl.us and www.xbrl.org.
For 2008, XBRL.us has created a new taxonomy which includes more than 15,000 accounts. This project creates a way to search for accounts or footnotes, and shows that these can be linked together.
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The 2007 project is to design an XBRL account finding tool to help users search for XBRL tags for their various accounts. This tool will benefit users by:
- Providing a quick and easy tool for looking up XBRL tags.
- Speeding up the process of finding unknown XBRL tags.
- Checking the accuracy of any given XBRL tag.
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2006 - Continuous Auditing with XBRL
This project is a proof of concept application of how XBRL could be used in a continuous auditing scenario. It has the following general processes:
- Import the XBRL Data
- Match the Accounts
- Run the Auditor Tools
- Return the Results
This project won the grand prize for the year, and was mentioned by the SEC Chairman Christopher Cox, in his speech titled The Promise of Interactive Data at the XBRL 2006 Conference.
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2005 - Hedging - XBRL Instance in Excel
Our project focuses on the use of hedging in an organization. Hedge accounting, used by many companies, is a way to reduce risk on the settlement value of goods and services whether buying or selling, changes in interest rates, foreign currency exchange, etc. With the program we developed, you can enter your journal entry, or numerous entries to an XBRL general ledger instance document, and it will eventually be loaded into the Beta version of Microsoft Excel.
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2004 - XBRL Footnote Generator
Footnotes have often been a source of confusion and misrepresentation in financial statements due to their complex and inconsistent nature. Recently, the controversial presentation of footnotes by some large corporations has inspired a need for a uniform footnoting system. By utilizing XBRL, we have developed a software application that will allow for clearer and more precise research and presentation of footnotes. This innovative software will allow for increased financial statement comparability, transparency, and understandability.
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2003 - XBRL Reference Tool
The globalization of business and industry has had a dramatic impact on accounting standards, practices, and reporting. The emergence of International Accounting Standards (IAS) created a recognized need for translating from IAS to U.S. GAAP while maintaining the integrity of accounts between the two taxonomies. To address this need, our team developed a database tool that facilitated the integration of available resources to provide a simple interface. We have designed a website that illustrates the link from U.S. GAAP accounts to corresponding IAS accounts in XBRL taxonomies.
The webpage that the students of Emporia State University's School of Business have created is designed as a translation tool to show the connection between United States Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) standards and International Accounting Standards (IAS).
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2002 - Financial Accounting Consolidation Application
XBRL is standardizing the way businesses communicate and exchange information. We have chosen to show the uses of XBRL in a consolidation of a parent and a subsidiary’s financial statements.
In this practical business application, we show how XBRL can be integrated with Microsoft’s Excel and the Visual Basic programming language to easily download a parent and subsidiary’s financial statements, prepare them for consolidation, and upload the result to XBRL, where users can view the consolidated totals on the Internet. In addition, we discuss the explanation for why XBRL is important and how it is becoming a significant business and accounting tool, along with the future implications of XBRL.
The team developed a Visual Basic application in Excel (not available) and submitted it for this project. The faculty sponsor was Dr. Zane Swanson and Dr. Bill Remington.
Students:
- Jill Beck
- Monica Hansen
- Jaryl Seth
- Scott Spielman
- Kushani Vindanagama