XBRL News about OIM and ESG
Here is our pick of the 3 most important XBRL news stories from the last week.
1 Last call: Standards for new XBRL formats set to go final
As part of a long-term strategic effort to modernise and simplify important aspects of digital reporting, the XBRL Standards Board this week voted to publish updated report format specifications at the Proposed Recommendation level. The new specifications provide regulators with new options for both data collection and analysis, taking account of the need for higher volumes of data and the capabilities of modern analytics tools to consume new formats directly.
The XBRL Open Information Model (OIM), of which these new formats are an important part, is a crucial step in the evolution of XBRL as a tool for business reporting beyond aggregated financial statements.
2 Mandatory ESG reporting and XBRL taxonomies combination …
Corporate financial statements address multiple stakeholders’ needs. International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRSs), among others, allow two different classifications, “by function of expense” and “by nature of expense”, for the statement of profit and loss and other comprehensive income for the period (from now on, also identified in short as “Income Statement”, or “IS”). XBRL standards ensure compliance and consistency in financial statements’ drafting and filing. XBRL taxonomies reflect the Income Statement IFRS disclosure requirement in the {310000} and {320000} codifications, respectively. Given the recent EU enhanced regulations that proposed extend mandatory ESG reporting to SMEs, this study aims to design and recommend an additional Income Statement to embed structured Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) disclosure.
Look what the search bot brought up! This is a rather odd academic piece, which on perfunctory reading seems to propose weighing income statement items with ESG ratings. From this layman’s perspective, its hard to tell what the point of this operation is, given the orthogonal dimensionality of these data items.
3 Workiva’s CFO on growth and ESG data
When entering college, Jill Klindt, CFO, SVP, and treasurer at Workiva Inc., a software-as-a-service company, thought she’d have a career maintaining the health of animals, not as a finance leader. “I was going to be a vet,” Klindt told me. “I really love animals. But as a vet, you have to have a little bit of a hardened heart.”
Aside from being a nice home story, the article appeared on your correspondent’s screen because Workiva continues to have pending deliverables on both accounts mentioned in the title: for growth, it is still not satisfying the rule of 40 (21 in fact, on last count), and as for ESG data, the company should provide its own ESG reporting. Note that the author has a commercial interest in the company.
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Christian Dreyer CFA is well known in Swiss Fintech circles as an expert in XBRL and financial reporting for investors.
We have a self-imposed constraint of 3 news stories each week because we serve busy senior leaders in Fintech who need just enough information to get on with their job.
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