Archive for the 'XBRL' Category

XBRL Group Email / XBRL vs. PBooks

Published
by
Albert
on May 28, 2007
in Accounting Software and XBRL
. 0 Comments

The XBRL Group was kind enough to provide an example XBRL-based chart of account, so I sent back this email to the list:

That is very helpful! Thank you very much.

I’m comparing the examples at GaLaPaGos and the example chart of accounts you just sent to the data model I’ve created in PBooks. So far, the way PBooks and the way XBRL handle journal entries is similar enough to give me a satisfying feeling of validation. :-)

I’ve modeled the PBooks journal entry data object to be as simple as possible. Two tables, journal_entries, and journal_entry_amounts, with a foreign key relationship between the two. A complete journal entry is comprised of one journal_entries row, and two or more journal_entry_amounts rows, whose credit/debit values sum should to zero. Thanks to what I gleaned from the journal entries XBRL example, I’ve added a user_id foreign key to the journal_entries table, as well as as a posting_date and a posting_status column to the journal_entry_amounts table. I’m considering adding a “balanced” flag to act as a simple caching mechanism to indicate whether the entry is balanced or not.

You can read more about the Pbooks data model here:

PBooks Open Source Bookkeeping Data Model

Thanks again.

Kudos to Team ESU

Published
by
Albert
on May 26, 2007
in Accounting Software, Bookkeeping Notes and XBRL
. 0 Comments

Team ESU

So after spending the morning researching, reading and evaluating various websites and software projects surrounding XBRL, I have to say I am most impressed with the work done by “Team ESU“. Its amazing that a group of students, with no budget and a zillion other things to do can put together such a great example of how XBRL can work. I’m not the only one who recognizes their accomplishment, the SEC Chairman, Christopher Cox gave a speech on “The Promise of Interactive Data”, during which he recognized the great work by these students.

I just left a note in their guest book about how I checked out their website and found it to be the one site that had XBRL information that I could understand! Not only do they show a working example of XBRL data manipulation, they also open their code for use in academic, non-commercial applications. Not all of it is open though, I couldn’t find a link to one of the example xml documents used for importing into their php code, but with some digging I found it. :-)