Resources

The Seattle Method is a proven, industrial strength, good practices, standards-based pragmatic approach to creating provably high quality XBRL-based general purpose financial reports explained in simple terms. For more information about the Seattle Method, please see this documentation which includes some posts from my prior blog:

Popular posts from this blog

Overview

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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 to accountants and software engineers building software for accountants.  The sources of the information provided below are my " lab notebook " from December 2007 to October 2022; my Digital Financial Reporting blog from October 2022 until January 2025; Mastering XBRL-based Digital Financial Reporting ; and finally my Seattle Method  documentation. What I have tried to do is take the seemingly hundreds of incomplete, far too technical, typically nonstandard explanations that I have come across; take the good/best ideas from each, make improvements to those explanations, and resynthesize the information into a form that is useful to me and perhaps useful to other business professionals which have a liberal arts education (i.e. not a technical oriented computer science education).  How my conclusions were reached are generall...
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Complexity

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The world is complex.  But sometimes humans can come together, leveraging the power of agreement, and agree enough to create something useful in meeting some specific important aim and satisfying some agreed upon set of goals and objectives. A kludge is an engineering/computer science term that defines what is best described as a workaround or quick-and-dirty solution that is typically clumsy, inelegant, inefficient, difficult to extend and hard to maintain; but it gets the job done. The nautical term for a kludge is jury rig. By contrast, elegance is beauty that shows unusual effectiveness, grace, and simplicity. The alternative to being a kludge is  elegant simplicity . Elegant simplicity is achieved through complexity via hard work an, clever ideas, etc. It is easy to create a system that is complex.  It is hard work to create a system that is simple.  People commonly confuse the terms "simple" and "simplistic". They do not describe the same thing. ...
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Area of Knowledge

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An area of knowledge is a highly organized socially constructed aggregation of shared knowledge (a.k.a. corpus) for a distinct subject matter.  Subject matter experts (SMEs) create, use, and maintain an area of knowledge. An area of knowledge has a specialized insider vocabulary, underlying assumptions (axioms, theorems, constraints, assertions, restrictions), and persistent open questions that have not necessarily been resolved (i.e. flexibility is necessary).  You can think about an area of knowledge as being characterized in a spectrum with two extremes: Kind area of knowledge: clear rules, lots of patterns, lots of rules, repetitive patterns, and unchanging tasks. Wicked area of knowledge: obscure data, few or no rules, constant change, and abstract ideas. Stakeholders of a system need to be in agreement as to an undisputed core knowledge of an area of knowledge. Sensemaking is the process of determining the knowledge, or deeper meaning or significance or essence, of the c...
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