XBRL's Global Ledger Framework: Exploring the standardised missing link to ERP integration

Abstract

is the XBRL Global Technical Leader for PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP. One of the original founders of XBRL, Mr Cohen has served in many leadership and technical roles within the organization. He is a prolifi c author and speaker, and ambassador of XBRL to other groups, including numerous standards organizations and governmental entities. Mr Cohen serves on numerous professional committees for the AICPA, the CICA and the IMA. Mr Cohen ' s professional interests include continuous auditing, data level assurance, and formalising the assurance reliance supply chain. ABSTRACT With the January 2009 mandate by the US Securities and Exchange Commission ofInteractive Data, as well as other governmental mandates and opportunities for compliance burden reductions globally, the Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) is becoming a more common and necessary part of corporate governance and compliance. Due to this external pressure, as well as the primary focus of XBRL advocates themselves to encourage governmental adoption of XBRL for compliance reporting, another important deliverable from XBRL International, Inc. -XBRL ' s Global Ledger Framework (XBRL GL) -and its obvious and immediate benefi ts to organisations has been given much less visibility than the external focused efforts; however, XBRL GL has the potential to bring more measurable benefi t to companies, in addition to helping support the benefi ts regulators and the markets receive from more transparent external reporting. XBRL GL serves as a metadata hub (to facilitate system interoperability), as a common face to data from different systems (facilitating common toolsets and controls) and as a tool to enable a seamless audit trail, spanning gaps between systems. XBRL GL seamlessly integrates incoming transactions and external facing reports, acting as a bridge, a single, holistic, generic view of data. While companies can continue to choose proprietary approaches, and while the XBRL Specifi cation itself is sometimes used as the basis for those approaches, it is a proper combination of XBRL GL with XBRL for external reporting that may offer the greatest benefi t to companies. While XBRL GL has some obvious potential benefi ts, the risk to companies and to the market as a whole is that lack of adoption of XBRL GL will lead to a proliferation of proprietary standards at different points in the Business Reporting Supply Chain and for different consumers, such as the world ' s tax regulators, leading to more confusion and burden instead of providing holistic solutions that provide benefi ts for all. Those responsible for corporate governance have a responsibility to make sure that interoperability solutions are being chosen with an eye on long-term value, and not just the easiest solution in the short term.

XBRL Acceptance in India: A Behavioral Study

“…As pointed by many researchers, XBRL is used as most advanced and rigorous standards taxonomy developed to help for a better assurance of future digital financial reports (Cohen, 2009;Lymer and Debreceny, 2003;Boritz and Wo, 2008;Plumlee and Plumlee, 2008;Shrivastava and Kogan, 2009;and Gonzalbez and Rodriguez, 2012). XBRL adoption allows organisations to report quickly (Cohenet al, 2005), and standardised data to be accessed at a lower cost with greater transparency.…”

Research on Implementation of the Financial Statements Based on XBRL Linkbase

“…Enterprises ERP system data and subsidiaries date are as merge data sources in the financial statements generated module, the enterprise can input merge data sources through the form of the interface inputting [5]. It also can use the corresponding software to quickly obtain the corresponding financial data or Excel files to directly obtain data, which makes data source into the integrated database.…”

Formalization of Standards, Automation, Robots, and IT Governance

“…This standardization can facilitate the automatic transmission of data between corporate and audit systems. Furthermore, the standard is proposing data to be tagged in XBRL/GL (Cohen 2009) further facilitating system interoperability. This standardization could be used for repeated extractions at close time intervals, creating the possibility of a close to real-time audit and, as by-products, continuous monitoring reports, or dashboards.…”