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FINANCIAL REPORTING USING XBRL – IFRS AND US GAAP EDITION (2006-03-01)

15. Understanding and Using Business
Rules (XBRL Formulas and XBRL Functions)
[This section is a DRAFT until the XBRL Formulas and XBRL Functions
specifications are made available. These specifications are anticipated to be
complete by December 2006. Until that time, a proprietary implementation of
business rules is shown in examples, etc. Fundamentally, they will achieve the
same purposes, but likely with different syntax. But, the concepts are the same.]
One of the most interesting and potentially powerful features of XBRL is its
business rules capabilities or "formulas" as they are called in the actual XBRL
specification. We will use the term business rules.
The discussion of business rule can be quite technical, but it is worth wading
through. Part of the reason it will be technical is to explain how and why
business rules work. The reason this explanation is provided it to help readers
see the impact on financial reporting of XBRL, basically opening the metadata and
semantics of business reporting to computer applications.
We will explain three important concepts in order to help understand business
rules: semantics, metadata, and business rules themselves.
We will then provide three specific examples of uses of business rules in financial
reporting to help readers understand what business rules are by showing what
they can be used for:
• Expressing financial reporting relationships,
• Expressing financial reporting ratios,
• Expressing a disclosure checklist.
Lastly, we will consolidate your understanding of business rules by thinking about
how the process of financial reporting might change if a computer can guide a
financial reporting professional through the process.

15.1. What are Business Rules?
In order to understand business rules, it is important to understand a few
concepts, which we will cover now. The discussion will be somewhat technical in
nature, but only to help readers grasp these important concepts. For those who
don’t care how things work, but only that they work; this section can be skipped.
Just as it is not important to know how to build a car or even be a mechanic if
you simply want to get in your car and drive; getting your hands a little greasy
can be fun!

15.1.1. Semantics 101
The first building block for understanding business rules is understanding the
concept of semantics. Fundamentally, XBRL is a method of expressing semantics,
or semantic meaning. This semantic meaning is expressed using an XML syntax;
but XBRL is more about semantic meaning.
For example, here is an XBRL concept as expressed in its XML form, in an XML
Schema:
<xs:element name="CashAndCashEquivalents" periodType="instant" balance="debit"
type="xbrli:monetaryItemType" />

© 2006 UBmatrix, Inc 428


The definition of the term "Cash and Cash Equivlents" is done in financial
reporting standards such as IFRS or US GAAP. XBRL expresses that concept so
that a computer application can read it using XML and XML Schema. XBRL also
allows the following information to be expressed about that concept, such as:
• References such as "IAS 7 6" which defines cash and cash equivalents
and "IAS 1 68 i" which indicates that cash and cash equivalents must be
presented on the balance sheet,
• Documentation, which basically allows those creating a taxonomy to
provide a definition for a concept within a taxonomy.
• Labels so humans can read the concept in a more familiar way such as
"Cash and Cash Equivalents" in English or "DisponibilitÃ Liquide e Mezzi
Equivalenti" in Italian. This is important, for example, if a user does not
speak English.
• Calculations which the fact that "Cash and Cash Equivalents" is included
in the calculation of "Assets, Total".
• Presentation which indicates that "Cash and Cash Equivalents" is the
most liquid asset therefore is the last in the list of assets on an order of
liquidity balance sheet.
All of this information is semantic meaning relating to the concept "Cash and
Cash Equivalents". This semantic meaning is expressed using XML, XML Schema,
XLink and other syntax, which make up the "funky looking" thing called XBRL,
specified in the XBRL Specification so that software developers from around the
world can all build compatible software which "speaks" XBRL.
And, also consider this. What if every company created their own definition of
"Cash and Cash Equivalents", expressing that meaning in their company specific
taxonomy or "dictionary/classification system of terms". Well, computers could
read those terms and know what they are, but may not be able to figure out that
the two different companies are actually talking about the same thing.
An alternative to everyone creating their own terms are to use standard
definitions, such as IFRS and US GAAP. Each defines "Cash and Cash
Equivalents". Now, the world would be a better place, perhaps, if there were only
one definition; but that cannot occur until there is only one globally used set of
financial reporting standards. IFRS exists because it was a problem having 80+
different sets of accounting standards around the world and trying to do business
with one another. Now, there are only really two sets of accounting standards:
IFRS and US GAAP, and those two sets of standards are converging. The IASB
(International Accounting Standards Board, the folks who create IFRS) and the
FASB (Financial Accounting Standards Board, the folks who create US GAAP) are
working to converge the two sets of financial reporting standards.
So, for political reasons there may never be one set of financial reporting
standards, but the two sets, IFRS and US GAAP, may have two concepts which
mean the same thing, or similar enough, that a "mapping" can be created
between the two concepts to indicate, to a computer, that they are the same
thing. That is another piece of semantics.
Expand this to the 4,000 to 10,000 or so concepts used in financial reporting, or
whatever can be agreed upon.
And can we agree on what concepts mean? Well, during the creation of the IFRS-
GP taxonomy several things came to light about IFRS, which were written by
humans. Humans make mistakes! There are inconsistencies in the
documentation which makes up IFRS, and certain things are vague or simply left



out. For example, there is a requirement that "Finance Costs" be disclosed on the
income statement under IFRS, but IFRS does not tell you what is include in
"Finance Costs". Therefore accountants around the world have to figure out what
goes into finance costs, and there are different interpretations, therefore less
comparability in financial statements. This came up in the area of Financial
Instruments, a very complicated and newer area of IFRS.
Eventually financial reporting standards can be less vague as the process of
expressing the standards in XBRL contributes to making these inconsistencies and
areas of vagueness in the financial reporting standards quite obvious, allowing for
the meaning to be expressed more precisely. All this contributes to better
financial reporting standards.
The bottom line is this. Semantics are defined for financial reporting by the
financial reporting standards, IFRS and US GAAP being the most dominant
standards globally. The XBRL specification is a rich set of tools and a global
standard method of expressing that semantic meaning using the XML syntax so
that computers can understand them. XBRL taxonomies are a way of creating
agreeing on common semantics, rather than everyone creating their on.
Business rules are part of that semantic meaning.

15.1.2. Metadata 101
Metadata is a commonly understood term within information technology, not so
common in business or financial reporting.
In short, metadata is data about data. Everyone knows what data is typically,
but the meaning of metadata is a bit harder to grasp; however the concept is
critical to understanding the benefits of XBRL.
You use metadata driven applications every day and you may not even realize it.
A good example is Microsoft Excel or Word. These programs are "localized" for
different languages. The metadata for the menus, dialog boxes, all the stuff you
see in the application is changed by applying a specific local's language to Excel
or Word, which drives the display of information in "English" if you are in the US
or in "Japanese" if you are in Japan.
Consider an invoice. Data on the invoice might include:
• the invoice number, "I-10001"
• the invoice date, "July 1, 2005"
• the quantity of each line item, "500 boxes"
• the amount of each line item, "$ 3000"
• the total amount of the invoice, "$ 9000"
The metadata for the invoice, which is data which expresses the information the
invoice must contain, might be things like:
• the invoice number must start with the letter "I", be followed by a dash,
and must be a 5 digit number,
• the invoice MUST contain an invoice number, an invoice date, at least one
line item, and a total
• the relationship on the invoice that the sum of the amounts of each line
item must agree to the total amount of the invoice, "SUM (Amount for Line
Item) = Total Amount"



If the metadata can be expressed in a consistent, standard way, it can then be
read by a computer application and other applications can use it. The metadata
can be exchanged automatically between applications along with the data being
expressed, resulting in new and better ways to transform and evaluate data.
One advantage of metadata driven applications is that they can be updated more
cost-effectively than "hard coded" applications. Computer programmers must
change hard coded applications. Business users can update metadata driven
applications. This makes updates faster (whenever the business user wants to
update them, not having to wait for the programmers to get around to it) and it
allows the business users to update the applications without having to
communicate with the programmers and articulate the business problem, the
business user can do this directly.
In terms of financial reporting, you will see applications driven by XBRL financial
metadata (a standardized set of financial terms, or taxonomies). These XBRL
taxonomies have already been developed for US GAAP financial reporting and
IFRS (International Financial Reporting Standards).
Computers can do some VERY interesting things with the metadata and data.
First, if the metadata is communicated in a standard way, it can be exchanged by
computer applications which understand that standard, reducing the need to build
lots of individual proprietary solutions to the same fundamental problem.
Second, you can build a method of expressing and therefore use the expression
of the semantic meaning which can be used to evaluate the data; but more
importantly to drive the functionality and workflow of computer applications.
The fact that data can be defined in an organized way (structured) rather than
unstructured, semantic meaning can be expressed as metadata, and XBRL is a
global standard that allows for the creation of business reporting solutions which
have functionality the likes of which have never been seen before. And at a
relatively low cost because the applications are useful, flexible, and therefore
used by so many.
A key to improving business reporting is metadata driven computer applications
using open standards to express that metadata.
It is not the case that these types of applications have not existed before, they
have. It is just that they were extremely expensive to create and therefore not
really available to the masses. And they were not as beneficial as there was no
global standard for the metadata.
The bottom line here is that the semantics expressed in XBRL taxonomies (see
the previous section) is metadata.

15.1.3. Business Rules 101
Business rules can be defined in many ways, and rather than using just one
definition here, we will provide several:
• The Business Rules Group (http://www.businessrulesgroup.org) defines
business rules as "a statement that defines or constrains some aspect of
the business which is intended to assert business structure, or to control
or influence the behaviour of the business."
• Or, business rules can be thought of as a way of expressing the semantic
meaning of data.
• Or another definition, "A formal and implementable expression of some
user requirement".



• Or "The practices, processes, and policies by which an organization
conducts its business.
Business rules exist in financial reporting, lots of them. To help you better
understand business rules, we provide the following examples of some of the
things which are considered business rules in financial reporting:
• Definitions such as "Assets = Liabilities + Equity"
• Calculations such as "Total Property, Plant and Equipment = Land +
Buildings + Fixtures + IT Equipment + Other"
• Process oriented such as "If property, plant, and equipment exists; then a
property, plant and equipment policy must exist and property, plant and
equipment disclosures must exist."
• Regulations such as "The following is the set of ten things which MUST be
reported if you have Property, Plant and Equipment on your balance
sheet: deprecation method by class, useful life by class, … (etc)"
• Instructions or documentation such as "Cash flow types must be either
operating, financing, or investing.
What business rules are is quite important because they are extraordinarily useful
for financial reporting. But what is even more important is HOW business rules
were created and used in the past, and how they will be created and used in the
future.
You may, or may not, remember the day when someone building a computer
application had to also build a place to store the data which that application used.
Well, those days are over with the advent of the standard relational database
management system (RDBMS) and structured query language (SQL). Basically,
the data is separate from the actual application and you can go buy a standard
SQL database, rather than everyone building their own. This separation between
the database and the application occurred in the 1980's.
Another separation which has taken place is the separation of the business rules
which drive the processing of the application from the application itself. This is a
bit more recent, occurring in the 1990's.
What is important to understand is the efficiencies and effectiveness which can be
achieved with business rules separated from applications themselves:
• Rather than paying programmers to update rules (which is expensive and
time consuming), business users who actually understand the rules can
update them, saving both time and money.
• Rather than having programmers create validation for each thing they
wish to validate (called one-to-one programmatic validation) a business
rules engine can be used to do validation (many-to-many rules-based
validation).
And what if the business rules are also in a global standard format? You can
exchange the rules with others. You can, for example,
1. use the rules to explain the data you are collecting,
2. which data needs to be collected,
3. validate the data prior to it being submitted, and
4. which data collection forms should be used by the type or quality of entity
submitting data.



All this promotes an understanding of business policies and procedures, facilitates
consistent decision making, forces order to rules and policies because they are
clearly expressed; all with increased flexibility because of the separation of the
processing logic from the rules, the ability of the business users to control the
processing logic easily without understanding programming.

15.2. Business Rules in Financial Reporting
Imagine the day when business rules can be expressed in a globally standard way
making it very cost effective for business users to create rich expressions of
semantic meaning and standard computer applications to evaluate the semantic
meaning. Imagine all the possibilities.
Well, that day is here today with XBRL. Not only can business rules be created,
but the business rules can be exchanged along with the data to (a) articulate how
the data was created and (b) indicate that there are no errors in the data by
having users validate the data against the rules you created. These rules are no
longer locked inside a relational database or an Excel spreadsheet where they are
both hard to reuse the business rules and easy to "hide" (unintentionally or
intentionally, i.e. fraud) in the "murky" rows and cells of a spreadsheet someone
else created.
The following are several examples of using business rules within financial
reporting. We will provide brief sets of examples to show some of the areas
where business rules can be useful.

15.2.1. A Simple General Example
We will start out by creating a simple example of a business rule, walking you
through step-by-step so you get the big picture of what is going on. This sample
exists in the files for this chapter; you can look at the example files for more
detailed information.
In order to focus, we will simplify the example as much as possible, eliminating
any distractions from the complexity of the problem; complexities will be
introduced in subsequent examples. This example is about as simple as it exists:

What we have is the reconciliation of cash at the end of a cash flows statement:
Cash Flow, Net + Cash and Cash Equivalents, Beginning of Year = Cash and Cash
Equivalents, End of Year.
We are using two taxonomies here. This first taxonomy (gaap.xsd) simply has
two concepts: "Cash and Cash Equivalents" and "Cash Flow, Net".



This would be equivalent to say the IFRS-GP or US GAAP taxonomy; here we
have simply deleted all the things we are not using to keep things clear.
The second taxonomy contains the business rule we defined (Business Rules):

The taxonomy containing the business rules references the "GAAP" taxonomy, as
those concepts are used in the business rule.
The business rule is created in the business rules taxonomy. The form for
creating the rule looks like this; here you can see the rule:

Note that the business rule is associate with the concept "CashReconciles". The
concept has a data type of Boolean (true/false). When the business rule is
evaluated, it will either be "true" or it will be "false".
Next, we see the instance document (SimpleGeneralExample-Instance.xml):



You can see the fact values contained in the instance document.
When we load the instance document and evaluate the business rule, we get a
report similar to the one below:

Notice that the report shows you the rule on the left and an evaluation of whether
the rule is "true" or "false". Here, the rule is evaluated twice and true both times.
If you look at row 10, you see the rule, but it is not being evaluated as there is
not enough data. If you look at the human readable printout, you see a
beginning balance for 2002 (for the period 2003), but there is no "Cash Flows,
Net" or beginning balance (for 2002, which would be a value for 2001), therefore
the formula cannot be calculated. To the right you see a lot of information about
how the "true" values were determined. This can be helpful in finding and
correcting errors.
One more thing is worth mentioning. Notice the XBRL instance document below
(SimpleGeneralExample-Instance_bizRule.xml):



This instance document was created when the business rules executed, it was
dynamically generated. Business rules can be used to create information from
other information, stringing the information together. Imagine stringing a series
of business rules together in order to generate a set of financial statements. This
is somewhat can be done with SQL sub-select statements, chaining many SQL
statements together.
So again, the goal was to walk you through the steps, not actually create the rule
or use the software. See Chapter 6, Exercise 5 for "Building a Business Rule" and
Chapter 7, Exercise 5 for "Validating with a Business Rule" to actually walk
through this using software.

15.2.2. Expressing Financial Reporting Relationships Using
Business Rules
Now we take a single rule (as we showed above) and apply that concept to the
entire Statement of Changes in Equity and show you in more detail what business
rules can be used for.
The first obvious area where business rules are quite useful is in fundamentally
expressing what the data is and how it relates. XBRL calculations to this to some
degree, but they are not that flexible. A more flexible tool is business rules. For
example, one of the limitations of XBRL calculations is the ability to express
cross-context calculations. And example of cross-context calculations is
something quite common to financial reporting, the movement analysis.
One example of a movement analysis is the Statement of Changes in Equity (we
will use IFRS). In fact, the Statement of Changes in Equity is a quite large
movement analysis. The basic set of business rules which can be expressed is
the following:
Beginning Balance + Changes = Ending Balance
The fact is, however, that the Statement of Equity can even be more complex, for
example if there is a prior period adjustment due to a change in accounting policy
or a fundamental error:
Originally Stated Balance + Prior Period Adjustments = Restated Beginning
Balance + Changes = Ending Balance
Neither of these relations can be expressed using XBRL calculations because the
beginning and ending balances are in different contexts (different instants of
time) and the changes are a different type of period altogether (a duration, rather
than an instant like the beginning and ending balances).
In the files for this chapter there is an XBRL taxonomy which defines 24 business
rules which "check" the Statement of Changes in Equity to see if the beginning
balance plus changes equals the ending balance of each of the following possible
movements in that statement:
• Issued Capital (Share Capital, Ordinary Shares; Share Capital, Preference
Shares; Share Premium, Ordinary Shares; Share Premium, Preference
Shares)
• Other Reserves (Capital Redemption Reserve, Merger Reserves, Option
Reserves, Warrant Reserves, Proposed Dividend Reserves, Legal and
Statutory Reserves, Reserves for General Banking Risks, Translation
Reserves, Revaluation Reserves, Hedging Reserves, Available for Sale
Reserves, Cumulative Income (Expense) Relating to Non Current Assets
and Disposal Groups Held for Sale, Miscellaneous Other Reserves)



• Treasury Shares
• Retained Earnings (Accumulated Losses)
• Subscribed Capital
• Minority Interest
• Equity, Total
All of these business rules are basically the same, so we will only show one here
so you get a sense of what the rules look like. The following is the business rule
(note that this is expressed using a UBmatrix Proprietary Formulas specification
syntax as the XBRL Formulas specification is not complete and no rules engines
exist to process XBRL Formulas at this writing):
ifrs-gp:ShareCapitalOrdinaryShares[-P1Y] + ifrs-
gp:ChangesInShareCapitalOrdinaryShares = ifrs-gp:ShareCapitalOrdinaryShares
The [-P1Y] means that the context is "one period less, and the period is a year"
(again, the beginning balance as opposed to the ending balance). Not that we
are NOT showing the restatement due to a prior period adjustment in this
formula, just the basic movement.
So again, with this example, we expanded the first simple rule example, showing
you that one type of rule can be used to evaluate all the movements within the
Statement of Equity. Below is a printout of one page of business rules for the
statement of equity:

With in the IFRS-GP taxonomy there are 61 "movement analysis" types of
calculations, each of which have one or more "movements". For example, the
Property, Plant and Equipment movement analysis has 9 classes (Land, Building,
etc) and a totals movement. The point here is that many movement analysis
type patterns exist in the IFRS-GP, as well as other financial reporting
taxonomies.



15.2.3. Expressing Financial Reporting Ratios Using Business
Rules
Another type of business rules which can be created are ratios. There are
common business ratios used in accounting. Below is a listing of some of these
ratios which are used under IFRS:
Ratio
Return on Equity Profit / Total Equity
Return on Assets Profit / Total Assets
Working Capital Current Assets – Current Liabilities
Current Ratio Current Assets / Current Liabilities
These ratios relate to concepts found in IFRS, and in the IFRS-GP taxonomy. We
can define these ratios in terms of the IFRS-GP taxonomy. The following is a
summary of some of these ratios, expressed in an XBRL taxonomy.

You can see this taxonomy in this chapter's subdirectory of the files which came
with this book. Open the taxonomy "UBmatrix-ifrs-gp-Ratios-2005-05-15.xsd" in
the subdirectory "Example-03-IFRS-Ratios". In that taxonomy, you will see a
number of ratios.
If you validate the instance document "SampleCompany-2005-05-15.xml" in this
sections subdirectory, the validation report "SampleCompany-2005-05-
15_calctrace.html" contains the calculated ratios. The following is one line item
from that report:

This shows the calculation of the ratio. Ratios are calculated for every
opportunity where data exists. The calculations can be quite complex, involving
getting the correct context, taking into consideration which data does and does
not exist, considering a fact value's decimals value, and so forth.



In addition, these values are can be saved into an XBRL instance document and
then further processed. See the file "SampleCompany-2005-05-15_bizRule.xml",
an example of the concepts created, which represent the business rules
expressed in the ratios taxonomy, is shown below:

This data can be fed into an analysis model or other system to be processed.
Those systems can flag data items which are outside acceptable parameters.
The formulas can be quite complex. The following is an example of a complex
formula:

The example above is a real business rule. As you can see, business rules can be
quite powerful. In addition, since these rules are expressed in a global standard
way, they can be shared with the data, or tested against publicly available
taxonomies to see if reported data falls within certain parameters. Users of the
data can use publicly available business rules, or proprietary rules why create, or
a combination of the two.

15.2.4. Expressing a Disclosure Checklist Using Business
Rules
A common task when creating a financial statement for external release, and
even for internal use many times, is the creation of a disclosure checklist. The
disclosure checklist usually takes the form of a piece of paper with three columns:
Yes, No, and N/A. The following is a URL to a disclosure checklist:
http://www.pwc.com/gx/eng/about/svcs/corporatereporting/Disclosure05.pdf
But what if the disclosure checklist was in the form of a computer application, the
relationships and expertise documented in a form which a computer can read?
What if the computer application could guide the user through the completion of
the checklist, and the financial statement.
Consider the following examples:



• Required: Certain pieces of information are always required such as the
entity's name and the revenue recognition policy.
• If, then: If there is a line item in the balance sheet for "Property, Plant and
Equipment", clearly there must be a set of "Property, Plant and Equipment
Policies" and a set of "Property, Plant and Equipment Disclosures".
• If, then: Included in that set of "Property, Plant and Equipment"
disclosures are, for each class of property, plant and equipment; the
depreciation policy, useful lives (or depreciation rates), and depreciation
method must be disclosed.
• Questionnaire: Sometimes the disclosure checklist is just to jog your
memory to be sure something was not forgotten.
Probably not everything, but many things can be expressed electronically and
read by a computer application, significantly enhancing the user experience.

15.3. Financial Reporting in the Future
Imagine if you had all of the following inside one application, the information
readable by a computer application:
• All accounting literature you might use,
• Model financial statements or "templates" to show you examples of what
things might look like
• Business rules which check everything which a computer was capable of
checking, relieving us humans to deal with exceptions.
• The XBRL taxonomies which represent the "meta data" of financial
reporting.
• And so forth…
Well, this is were things are actually moving to. These capabilities will likely be
created by the most knowledgeable accountants making the complexities of
financial reporting that much easier for those of us which don’t have to deal with
the "nooks and crannies" every day, but don’t want to fall into them if they are
there.
Analysis of the financial information will even be more interesting.


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Chapter 15-understanding andusingbusinessrules

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