XBRL Extension Boost pack (for SEC fillings)

Posted on Thu 22 March 2012 in XBRL

I think the title of this post is correct in the sense that the amount of extensions that have been created in XBRL fillings on sec.gov.

Python/ElementTree has helped me in doing so!

I have extracted all extensions that are gone in XBRL fillings of during that last quater of 2011. Output has surprised me. It is 1092354. There are 1092354 line of labels(with their extensions) during last three months of 2011 were filling in XBRL on SEC.

SEC has given around 16000 elements and we have created so much extensions.

Well i am putting my output in excel as a link. They are in 8 parts; 1-1 for 10th and 12th month and 6 part for 11th month of 2011. Below is the link for that.

In the excel there is a column as "sumtax", it gives information about taxonomy version; 2 for UGT-2011 and 1 for UGT-2009 and 0 for mutual funds ... .

Anyway, such amount of extensions will create XBRL mess. We can't compare our financials when there is so much difference in xml tags of valuable data.

I think one solution will be, lets put this data into public domain, just like search taxonomy feature of xbrl.us and tell fillers to use from this database when they require extra extensions.

Solve it like a distrubuted way.(like wiki has grown)

Also along with it, chartered accountant from all over the USA/abroad should invest their little time online for finding elements which has similar meaning. Because we are focusing on single and last quarter, it will be sufficient for us.

Anyway, lets see, may be FASB/SEC will prohibited the extensions or public domain will find their way to standardize extensions(based on the concept of crowd sourcing).