You may have noticed that it is quiet on this site. I now split my time more or less evenly between the Centre for Social Justice and a new educational charity for honest money and social progress, which will launch soon.
I am available for occasional consulting engagements in electronic financial reporting, but please first approach my clients CoreFiling.
For more information, see stevebaker.info.
Six fast hours of work later: full featured CMS-driven site with a page structure in place, ready for anyone to add content.
Nearly free: you need a handy server and should make some donations.
While in New York teaching XBRL to financial professionals, I happened to find the following in “Human Action, a treatise on economics” by Ludwig von Mises, published in 1949, 1963 and 1966.
I make no claims about this extract’s correctness, I simply found this old-fashioned piece an interesting perspective for the engineer coming to terms with the requirements of professional accounting today:
In balance sheets and in profit-and-loss statements the result of past action becomes visible as the difference between the money equivalent of funds owned (total assets minus total liabilities) at the beginning and at the end of the period reported, and as the difference between the money equivalent of costs incurred and gross proceeds earned. In such statements it is necessary to enter the estimated money equivalent of all assets and liabilities other than cash. These items should be appraised according to the prices at which they could probably be sold in the future or, as is especially the case with equipment for production processes, in reference to the prices to be expected in the sale of merchandise manufactured with their aid. However, old business customs and the provisions of commercial law and of the tax laws have brought about a deviation from sound principles of accounting which aim merely at the best attainable degree of correctness. These customs and laws are not so much concerned with correctness in balance sheets and profit-and-loss statements as with the pursuit of other aims.
Commercial legislation aims at a method of accounting which could indirectly protect creditors against loss. It tends more or less to an appraisal of assets below their estimated market value in order to make the net profit and the total funds owned appear smaller than they really are. Thus a safety margin is created which reduces the danger that, to the prejudice of creditors, too much might be withdrawn from the firm as alleged profit and that an already insolvent firm might go on until it had exhausted the means available for the satisfaction of its creditors.
Contrariwise tax laws often tend toward a method of computation which makes earnings appear higher than an unbiased method would. The idea is to raise effective tax rates without making this raise visible in the nominal tax rates schedules. We must therefore distinguish between economic calculation as it is practiced by businessmen planning future transactions and those computations of business facts which serve other purposes.
(Paragraph breaks my own.)
After delivering a successful three-day XBRL training course to a tax authority, I am about to deliver two further courses to an enterprise software developer: two days for developers and a half day for managers. Major business application developers are beginning to ask for XBRL courses.
So, I believe XBRL is about to take off in the UK. Please contact my client CoreFiling for more information.
Following Netscape’s theme, Google Chrome, evidence that all software applications tend towards operating systems:
We’re applying the same kind of process isolation you find in modern operating systems.
Bets on Chrome being extended in a couple of years to provide virtualisation?
Thanks for coming!
… and look what happens.
In the two years I have been in the City, XBRL has come a long way. CoreFiling is really starting to pull things together.
I have been using CoreFiling’s Spidermonkey recently. It’s good, really good.
Building on the Eclipse platform, CoreFiling have not only rocketed ahead of their competitors in the field of XBRL taxonomy development, with a tool that is robust, usable and effective, but they are also offering a free personal version.
I recommend you go try it for yourself.
A busy few months since my last post, working outside the field of software, but I’m back.
Right now, I am working on three different XBRL training courses – for managers, developers and taxonomists – and it looks like I may be traveling to consult in the Antipodes and the Caribbean…
If time allows, I plan some XBRL tutorials…
37Signals’ Getting Real is a great read. As they say, straight-through server-side systems require more rigour, but I can see this is the way to go for web applications:
Getting Real is about skipping all the stuff that represents real (charts, graphs, boxes, arrows, schematics, wireframes, etc.) and actually building the real thing.
And I’ll be making time – at last – to learn Ruby on Rails…