Monday, July 11, 2016

…And the winner is: Lennar Corp with a filing by Workiva. 

So far two major takeaways:

1) The XBRL instance document is a bit hard to find:

When a company files an iXBRL filing, it does not come with a traditional XBRL instance document…all the info is instead embedded in the main HTML document. 

So instead of this:

 You see this:

HOWEVER an instance document is auto-generated by the SEC upon acceptance using the information provided by the inline HTML document, and placed on the FTP server.

Also, I assume some of the file placements are subject to chance since we are all new at this.

2) In the auto-generated instance document, text blocks do NOT contain inline tags:

In other words, in the company filed iXBRL document, a disclosure might look like this:

But in the corresponding text block, it looks like this:

Initial conversations suggest this was done on purpose, but we see it as a big missed opportunity to extend the usefulness of inline XBRL.Anyone just looking at the text blocks will not have access to the tagging info, which is the whole power of iXBRL.

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