XBRL Video #1 Transcript

Inline Viewer Video #1 Transcript

Inline Mock filing: https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=ixviewer/samples/bst/out/bst-20160930.htm

Inline Introduction

Welcome to an overview of the Inline XBRL Viewer, a new, open source software tool for viewing, navigating, and searching public company financial reports. I am Matthew Slavin with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s Office of Structured Disclosure within the Division of Economic and Risk Analysis.   

This brief introduction will highlight how the viewer lets you navigate, review, and search an Inline XBRL quarterly or annual filing in ways never before possible.

Overview and Navigation

In this example we won’t’ be working with an actual filing, but one we’ve created for this demonstration.

When viewing a filing using the Inline XBRL Viewer, you’ll notice a border around each tagged disclosure.  If you want to look at the underlying XBRL tag, simply click on the item to reveal detailed information about that disclosure, such as can be seen in this example using cash and equivalents on the balance sheet.

The Inline XBRL viewer lets you easily navigate a filing.  On the left hand side of the toolbar, you’ll find tagged sections.  Expanding this will show a table of contents for the various tagged financial report sections.  For example, expanding the notes section and selecting segment information will take you to that footnote while selecting document and entity information will return you to top of the filing.  This feature can help you to quickly find the disclosure you are looking for, without having to learn the presentation structure developed by each filer.

Topic Search Function

Here’s something that may be especially appealing.  When you’re looking for specific disclosures, you might use the browser word search feature.  If you do that to search for ‘Stock Compensation’ in this sample filing you would only find a single result.

Now watch this.  In addition to the common browser word search, the Inline XBRL viewer lets you perform a reference topic search of the underlying information associated with the tagged disclosures. 

For example, by checking the reference search option in settings,

You can now search related reference information such as FASB accounting standards topic 718 (“Stock Compensation”).

By typing “FASB AND 718” in the reference box and clicking the search button, the Viewer returns matching results in our sample filing for share-based compensation, showing both the description of the accounting policy and other disclosures that have the associated reference.

This topic search function highlights any narrative text and amounts related to the FASB 718 tag reference.  Identifying all items related to disclosure topics of interest may help reduce search time for users.  This function wasn’t available before the Inline XBRL Viewer.

Filter Function

Filtering is another powerful feature of the Inline XBRL Viewer.  For example, one filter allows you to quickly identify all amounts that were tagged as negative values in XBRL.  

You can also search for values where a standard tag was not used and a custom tag was created instead.  For example, if a filer created a custom tag for a goodwill amount on the balance sheet, the Inline XBRL Viewer will highlight those amounts.

Combining different filters allows you to efficiently pinpoint specific disclosures.  For example, to view all numerical disclosures reported by business segment for 2015, simply select “amounts only” from data, “2015” from Periods, and “Business Segments” from Axes.  As you can see, the viewer quickly highlights and lists the matching results.  Note that in the tool bar, each combined filter is listed and can be individually removed.

The filter function allows users to quickly find potential data errors.

Conclusion

These are just a few of the things you can do with the Inline XBRL Viewer.  I hope this demonstration has been helpful to you.  If you have any feedback – including thoughts or ideas on improving the viewer – please contact us at StructuredData@sec.gov. 

The Inline Viewer software is open source, and freely available  to facilitate the creation of cost effective Inline XBRL viewer features and analytical products by software developers.

We thank you for your time and hope that these and the other features of the Inline XBRL Viewer will assist users in navigating, searching, and reviewing the structured disclosures within Inline XBRL filings.