Can XBRL be used by NFPs and small businesses to gain internal efficiences with their accounting and financial reporting functions?
The Maryland Association of CPAs recently set out to see for oursleves and using a set of tools from Altova were able to use XBRL successfully to map our financial data, moving it into KPI software, and believe it can be used to populate tax filings, produce on-line financial statements and much more.
The project was done with our Director of Finance, Skip Falatko, CPA and a college student intern, Tom Hood IV (Salisbury University) with inpsiration and coaching by Eric E. Cohen of PWC (and a founding member of XBRL).
This case study was produced by Altova after hearing about our use of XBRL GL to tag and embed XBRL into our general ledger and then map to our financial statements and the US GAAP taxonomy. From here we can map to IFRS, our KPI system, and much, much more.
and did we say that we did this with an accounting intern?
We do think it is a powerful new technology that can reshape the financial reporting supply chain much like barcodes transformed the mfg and distribution supply chains.