Fact

A fact is a logical statement representing a measurement or observation typically expressed with numbers and words. 

For example, a fact might be “assets for the consolidated legal entity Microsoft as of June 20, 2017 was $241,086,000,000 expressed in US dollars and rounded to the nearest millions of dollars". 

Dimensions (a.k.a. aspects, axis, facet) can be used to distinguish and differentiate the context of facts. There are three core dimensions:

  • Reporting entity
  • Calendar Period
  • Concept (a.k.a. primary item, line items)
Additional explicit dimensions can be added to distinguish and differentiate facts. A fact has a collection of ZERO to many explicitly defined noncore dimensions.

There are three types of facts:

  • Numeric
  • Nonnumeric
  • Prose
Facts have a collection of ZERO to many parenthetical explanations (a.k.a. comments, footnotes).

Technical:

A fact is a molecule.  Facts are represented within an XBRL instance. Dimensions of a fact are represented using XBRL Dimensions.

Duplicate facts should NEVER BE ALLOWED.  Note this guidance on duplicate facts provided by XBRL International, Handling Duplicate Facts in XBRL and Inline XBRL.

Commentary:

Calendar period is not used to describe the fiscal period or quarter.

Additional Information:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Overview

Image
( Executive summary ) Innovation doesn’t arrive. Innovation evolves. Imagine it.  Freedom from drudgery. Freedom from the toil of tedious, repetitive, mundane, monotonous tasks. Far less time needs to be spent fulfilling the role of "data janitor".  Time spent "transaction chasing" is significantly reduced. Accounting is a well understood system which has evolved over many thousands of years. Accounting, reporting, auditing, and analysis is being digitized. This digitization will enable processes to be industrialized  and productivity boosts to be realized.  This overview is an attempt to take the work that I have done to understand XBRL-based reports and back into a framework for explaining those reports, accounting and audit working papers, analysis models to accountants and software engineers building software for accountants.  I am now referring to this as model-driven reporting . The sources of the information provided below are my " lab notebook " f...
Read more

Reference Reporting Frameworks

Image
A financial reporting scheme is a purposeful arrangement of financial line items, totals, subtotals, aggregations, disaggregations, structures, metadata, categorization, classification, assertions, restrictions, constraints, other conditions, etc. A financial reporting scheme represented in a digital format should not be semantically impoverished. Leaving information out, consciously or unconsciously, is not desirable. These reference reporting frameworks provide the minimum of what is necessary. They are modest, not impoverished, yet not as secure as they actually need to be. The following are a set of reference reporting frameworks (a.k.a. reporting schemes, knowledge regimes) which helps those interested in understanding how to create an industrial strength reporting scheme using the Seattle Method to do so. Included with each reporting framework is a reference report which tests the entire reporting framework and a number of reports which helps one understand the notion of reportin...
Read more

Core Pattern

Image
The core idea of XBRL is global open industry standard for information exchange  that is machine-interpretable that is also interpretable by humans (i.e. one version of information, usable by both humans and machines). This is achieved using the notion of the " information block ". The meaning conveyed by that information block is expressed using the XBRL global open industry standard format. Having one version of information that is readable by both a machine and a human means that a common shared cognitive understanding and mutual knowledge provided by the information block is usable by both machine and human. An information block is a holon . An information block is an organism . An information block is a semantic unit which is stable and structurally sound. An information block is both a stand alone unit and a component of a larger unit which has robust structural integrity.  Tensegrity . Epistemic traceability is a trail of thought and reasoning; the ability to track ex...
Read more