22 February 2010

Weekly Dynamic: FRx and XBRL

The question comes up of whether FRx will handle XBRL. The answer is yes and no. The XBRL specifications, tags and taxonomies have evolved since the first specification and FRx has not evolved as quickly because of the ultimate move from FRx to Management Reporter. Consequently it's important to understand what FRx will and won't do with respect to XBRL reporting.

  • FRx only supports monetary items, not decimal, ratio/percentage or text data
  • FRx doesn't support footnotes
  • FRx doesn't provide a way to enter the entity scheme and identifier required in an instance document. Generic information is created and needs to be manually changed.
  • FRx generates an instance document for each unit of the reporting tree. This may or may not ultimately be what a company needs.
  • FRx does not support CALC columns with XBRL output. Only GL and Forecaster columns will export.
[H.T. to Greg Byer of MS for clarifying these points in a partner newsgroup post.]