XBRL US Domain Working Group
United
States Financial Reporting Taxonomy Framework
General
Concepts Taxonomy
Release Date: 2003-07-07
Release
Type: Acknowledged
Taxonomy Documentation
Status: |
Public Working Draft, issued in accordance with XBRL
International Processes REC 2002-04-20. |
Issued: |
2003-07-07 (July 7, 2003) |
Name: |
General Concepts |
Description: |
This taxonomy is intended to provide high-level accounting
terms that will allow jurisdictional and industry taxonomies to be created
that conform to specific accounting standards (such as US GAAP C&I) in
order to tag financial statements in XBRL. |
Namespace identifier: |
|
Recommended namespace prefix: |
usfr-gc |
Version of XBRL Specification Used: |
XBRL 2.0a Specification dated 2002-11-15 |
Relation to Other XBRL Taxonomies: |
This taxonomy does not reference any other XBRL taxonomies. It is intended to be referenced by other industry taxonomies such as the US GAAP CI taxonomy, a part of the United States (US) Financial Reporting (FR) Taxonomy Framework. Other taxonomies in the USFR Taxonomy Framework are Global Common Document (INT-GCD), Accountants Report (INT-AR), Primary Terms (USFR-PT), Management Report (USFR-MR), Notes and Management Discussion and Analysis (USFR-NAMDA), SEC Officers Certification (USFR-SEC-CERT) and US GAAP CI (US-GAAP-CI). |
Physical Location of Taxonomy Package: |
http://www.xbrl.org/taxonomy/us/br/common/gc/2003-07-07/usfr-gc-2003-07-07.xsd (Schema) http://www.xbrl.org/taxonomy/us/br/common/gc/2003-07-07/usfr-gc-2003-07-07-references.xml (References linkbase) http://www.xbrl.org/taxonomy/us/br/common/gc/2003-07-07/usfr-gc-2003-07-07-labels.xml
(Labels linkbase) http://www.xbrl.org/taxonomy/us/br/common/gc/2003-07-07/usfr-gc-2003-07-07-presentation.xml
(Presentation
linkbase) http://www.xbrl.org/taxonomy/us/br/common/gc/2003-07-07/usfr-gc-2003-07-07-calculation.xml
(Calculation linkbase) http://www.xbrl.org/taxonomy/us/br/common/gc/2003-07-07/usfr-gc-2003-07-07-definition.xml (Definition linkbase) |
Rob Blake, Microsoft
Brad
Rob Blake, Microsoft
Glen Buter, CPA, BDO Siedman
Eric Cohen, CPA, PricewaterhouseCoopers
Michael Eng CPA, Deloitte & Touche
Sal Mileti, CPA, Ernst & Young
Jeff Naumann, CPA, AICPA
Paul Penler, CPA, Ernst & Young
Brad Saegesser, Moody’s KMV
Brian
Staples, Bank of
http://www.xbrl.org/taxonomy/us/br/common/gc/2003-07-07/usfr-gc-2003-07-07.htm (HTML Format)
http://www.xbrl.org/taxonomy/us/br/common/gc/2003-07-07/usfr-gc-2003-07-07.pdf (PDF Format)
http://www.xbrl.org/taxonomy/us/br/common/gc/2003-07-07/usfr-gc-2003-07-07.doc (Word Format)
http://www.xbrl.org/taxonomy/us/br/common/gc/2003-07-07/usfr-gc-2003-07-07-elements.pdf (PDF Format)
http://www.xbrl.org/taxonomy/us/br/common/gc/2003-07-07/usfr-gc-2003-07-07-elements.xls
(Excel Format)
© 2003 AICPA® All
Rights Reserved. AICPA liability, , and rules apply.
This Taxonomy Documentation describes the eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) US Financial Reporting Taxonomy: General Concepts (USFR-GC). The USFR-GC Taxonomy has been prepared by the XBRL US Domain Working Group, with feedback from other members of XBRL International as well.
This USFR-GC Taxonomy is compliant with the XBRL 2.0a Specification, dated 2002-11-15 (http://www.xbrl.org/tr/2001/). It is a taxonomy used in conjunction with other taxonomies to create XBRL instance documents dealing with business reporting data. Specifically, the USFR-GC taxonomy represents the high-level accounting concepts typically found in business and financial reports such as the Income Statement and Balance Sheet.
This document assumes a general understanding of accounting and XBRL. If the reader desires additional information relating to XBRL, the XBRL International web site (http://www.xbrl.org) is recommended. In particular, a reading of the XBRL 2.0a Specification is highly recommended (http://www.xbrl.org/tr/2001/).
The terminology used in this document frequently overlaps with terminology from other disciplines. The following definitions are provided to explain the use of terms within the XBRL knowledge domain.
Taxonomy |
An XBRL Taxonomy is an XML Schema-compliant .xsd file that contains XBRL elements, which are XML elements that are defined by XBRL-specific attributes. An XBRL Taxonomy may also contain references to XLink linkbases. |
Instance document |
An XML document that includes on or more XBRL elements and optional references to zero or more XLink linkbases. |
Element |
An XBRL element is a “fact” or piece of information described by an XBRL taxonomy. For example, an element with the name “Income” is the USFR-GC taxonomy’s XBRL element name for the financial statement disclosure fact for “Income”. |
Linkbase |
Linkbases provide additional information about XBRL
elements, in particular, relationships between them such as the relationship
that “Expenses” is defined as a part of “Income and Expenses.” Linkbases used
by XBRL are compliant with the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) XML Linking Language (XLink)
Recommendation 1.0, |
1.4. Relationship
to Other Work
2.3. Element
Naming Convention
2.6. Further Documentation Available
3. Items to Note in Using
the Taxonomy
3.2. How to Interpret the Taxonomy Structure
3.4. Financial
Accounting Concepts
3.7. Entering
Numeric Values into Instance Documents
5.3. Concepts
and Considerations
7. Review and Testing,
Updates and Changes
7.3. Errors and Clarifications
The XBRL US Domain Working Group is leading the development of this eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) General Concepts (USFR-GC) Taxonomy for the purpose of expressing common high-level financial reporting concepts according to the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) FAS 6 and other related/relevant accounting standards.
This General Concepts (USFR-GC) Taxonomy is designed to facilitate the creation of XBRL jurisdiction and industry taxonomies focused on financial reporting. The purpose of the USFR-GC Taxonomy is to provide high-level concepts for the consistent creation of XBRL documents for financial reporting purposes by private sector and certain public sector entities. The purpose of this and other taxonomies produced using XBRL is to supply a framework that will facilitate data exchange among software applications used by companies and individuals as well as other financial information stakeholders, such as lenders, investors, auditors, attorneys, and regulators.
The authority for this USFR-GC Taxonomy is based upon US Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP). Its development is based on input from accounting firms, technology companies and other domain experts in the field of financial reporting. In addition, the specific content of the taxonomy is based upon standards identified by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) and other related standards organizations.
The particular disclosures in this USFR-GC Taxonomy model are:
1. Required
by numerous
2. Typically represented in AICPA model financial statements, checklists and guidance materials as provided from each of the major international accounting firms.
3. Found in common reporting practice, or
4. Flow logically from items 1-3, for example, sub-totals and totals.
This USFR-GC Taxonomy is in compliance with the XBRL 2.0a Specification, dated 2002-11-15 (http://www.xbrl.org/tr/2001/).
The USFR-GC Taxonomy is an Acknowledged Public Working Draft. Its content and structure have
been reviewed by the XBRL US Domain, XBRL Specification and XBRL
International Domain Working Groups.
XBRL Taxonomies can exist in five states insofar as XBRL International
is concerned:
The following is a summary of levels
of approval attainable within each state of Taxonomy approval outlined above:
This
USFR-GC Taxonomy is released in conjunction
with XBRL International’s Global Common
Document (
. These taxonomies are all part of the US Financial Reporting Taxonomy Framework, an XBRL taxonomy framework that enables reusability of components and provides the foundation for creating new industry taxonomies (such Insurance, Real Estate, Dealers/Brokers) going forward.
The USFR-GC Taxonomy is designed to represent high-level business and financial reporting concepts. As such, its structure and scope is related to the other taxonomies described above, but does not incorporate any elements of the reporting taxonomies listed above. It is a stand-alone taxonomy typically used in conjunction with other taxonomies.
Taken together, these taxonomies will meet
the reporting needs of companies that meet three criteria; (i) they report
under FASB standards, (ii) are in the broad category of “commercial and
industrial” industries and (iii) have relatively common reporting elements in
their financial statements. In practice, these three criteria are less likely to
hold for all companies. Additional taxonomies
are likely to be required. These
taxonomies are likely to identify the particular needs of:
These
extension taxonomies will either extend the USFR-GC Taxonomy to meet the
particular reporting requirements of that industry, country or company and/or restrict by limiting the use of
particular USFR-GC Taxonomy elements.
The
inter-relationships of the various taxonomies are show in Figure 1:
Figure 1: Interrelationship of Taxonomies and Instance Document
XBRL utilizes the World Wide Web consortium (W3C www.w3.org ) recommendations, specifically:
The primary purpose of the USFR-GC Taxonomy is to provide high-level financial
reporting concepts to the USFR Taxonomy Framework which includes the following
detailed information (specific XBRL taxonomy namespaces in parenthesis):
Reporting elements from the USFR-GC
taxonomy may be incorporated into a wide variety of other disclosures from
press releases to multi-period summaries.
This USFR-GC Taxonomy makes available to users high-level financial reporting concepts as defined by SFAS CON 6. This taxonomy is an expression of financial information in terms that are understandable to humans, but more importantly also understandable by a computer application.
The USFR-GC Taxonomy is made up of a “package” of interrelated XML files:
The package is represented visually with an example based on the concept of “Income” as shown in Figure 2:
Figure 2: USFR-GC
The USFR-GC Taxonomy contains approximately 14 unique high-level financial reporting concepts identified by FASB FAS 6. These 14 or so reporting concepts are common concepts recognized across various types of financial reporting, jurisdictions and industries such as “Assets”, “Revenue” and “Expense”. The XML Schema file at the heart of the USFR-GC taxonomy provides a straightforward listing of the elements in the taxonomy. The USFR-GC linkbases provide the other information necessary to interpret (e.g. Label and Definition linkbases) taxonomy elements or place a given taxonomy element in context of other taxonomy elements (e.g. Calculation and Presentation linkbases).
Given that information on the
Taxonomy is included in XML Schema and linkbase files, it is best rendered for
human interpretation in a “paper” paradigm. Users are encouraged to review
versions of the taxonomy elements in Adobe Acrobat (PDF) http://www.xbrl.org/taxonomy/us/br/common/gc/2003-07-07/usfr-gc-2003-07-07-elements.pdf
or Excel http://www.xbrl.org/taxonomy/us/br/common/gc/2003-07-07/usfr-gc-2003-07-07-elements.xls
formats.
However, in this rendering much of the characteristics of taxonomy are not obvious. The paper paradigm is two dimensional, whereas the information in the taxonomy is multidimensional. The application of a metaphor assists in understanding taxonomies. The USFR-GC Taxonomy is organized in a relatively “flat” format. Each reporting concept is listed individually and rolled up to basic accounting concepts found in the USFR-GC. This organization is used because it is understood by most accountants who use this metaphor to organize their audit working papers; to put the notes to the financial statements in order and in a variety of other uses. This metaphor is also familiar to the users of financial statements.
However, this metaphor and organization somewhat limits an understanding of the power behind an XBRL taxonomy. A taxonomy has multiple “dimensions”. Relationships can be expressed in terms of definitions, calculations, links to labels in one or more languages, links to one or more references, etc. The metaphor used expresses only one such relationship.
The USFR-GC Taxonomy is divided logically into sections that correspond to typical business and financial reporting high-level concepts. While there is no true concept of “sections” in the Taxonomy, their purpose is to group similar concepts together and facilitate navigation within the Taxonomy.
The USFR–GC Taxonomy uses a readable
Currently, labels for taxonomy elements are provided in English. In the future, taxonomy labels could be expressed in additional languages as required.
This Taxonomy provides references to FASB and other relevant standards. Figure shows the reference elements are used in this taxonomy, using “FASB FAS 6” to illustrate how a reference is matched to these elements:
Figure 3: Reference Naming Structure
Name: |
FAS |
Number: |
6 |
Paragraph: |
|
Subparagraph: |
|
Clause: |
|
(FASB) - Financial
Accounting Standards Board;
(CT) - FASB Accounting
Standards Current Text and its Appendix E;
(SX) - Regulation S-X;
(Topic) - Topic paragraph in
Codification of SEC Staff Accounting Bulletins (SAB);
(FAS) - Statement of
Financial Accounting Standards;
(APB) - Accounting
Principles Board Opinion;
(EITF) - FASB Emerging
Issues Task Force issue;
(SOP) - AICPA Statement of
Position;
(PB) - AICPA Practice
Bulletin;
(SAS) - Statement on
Auditing Standards;
(ARB) - Accounting Research
Bulleting;
(FRR) - SEC Financial
Reporting Release;
(FTB) - FASB technical
Bulletin;
(SP) - SEC Staff Position;
(FIN) - FASB
Interpretations;
(CON) - FASB Statement of
Financial Accounting Concepts;
(ATB) - Accounting
Terminology Bulletins;
(APS) - Accounting
Principles Board Statement
The
intent of this document is to explain the Taxonomy. This document assumes a
general understanding of accounting and XBRL. If the reader desires additional
information relating to XBRL, the XBRL International web site (http://www.xbrl.org)
is recommended. Specifically, a reading of the XBRL 2.0a Specification is
highly recommended (http://www.xbrl.org/tr/2001/).
The purpose of this document is to explain how XBRL is being applied in this
specific case, for this taxonomy.
The following documentation is available to assist those wishing to understand and use this taxonomy. This documentation is available on the XBRL International web site (http://www.xbrl.org):
These documents correspond to a set of interrelated files comprising an XBRL taxonomy package:
These files are located as follows:
http://www.xbrl.org/taxonomy/us/br/common/gc/2003-07-07/usfr-gc-2003-07-07.xsd (Schema)
http://www.xbrl.org/taxonomy/us/br/common/gc/2003-07-07/usfr-gc-2003-07-07-references.xml (References linkbase)
http://www.xbrl.org/taxonomy/us/br/common/gc/2003-07-07/usfr-gc-2003-07-07-labels.xml (Labels linkbase)
http://www.xbrl.org/taxonomy/us/br/common/gc/2003-07-07/usfr-gc-2003-07-07-presentation.xml
(Presentation linkbase)
http://www.xbrl.org/taxonomy/us/br/common/gc/2003-07-07/usfr-gc-2003-07-07-calculation.xml
(Calculation linkbase)
http://www.xbrl.org/taxonomy/us/br/common/gc/2003-07-07/usfr-gc-2003-07-07-definition.xml
(Definition linkbase)
Since this taxonomy is imported by/into other taxonomies, a stand-alone instance document is not provided. Please see taxonomies such as the US GAAP CI for sample company instance documents.
The following explanation of the taxonomy, the taxonomies with which this USFR-GC is designed to interoperate, and examples of how to interpret the USFR-GC Taxonomy are provided to make the USFR-GC Taxonomy easier to use. Please refer to the detailed printout of the USFR-GC Taxonomy as you go through this explanation (http://www.xbrl.org/taxonomy/us/br/common/gc/2003-07-07/usfr-gc-2003-07-07-elements.pdf). This explanatory document is designed to provide an overview of the USFR-GC Taxonomy to be a brief and concise overview. We expect that the XBRL community will create courses, books and other materials to provide a thorough explanation of every aspect of using the USFR-GC Taxonomy and other cognate taxonomies.
The element fragment shown in Figure 4 exists within the Taxonomy:
Figure 3: Sample Elements
Element |
Label |
ID Number |
Page |
IncomeExpenses |
Income and Expenses |
|
1 |
Income |
Income |
|
1 |
Expenses |
Expenses |
|
1 |
This means that for business reporting, there is an element called “Income
and Expense”. This is represented by the element with that label, and a
composite name of “IncomeExpense”.
If a company reports their financials using an XBRL instance document,
then because “Income and Expense” is a “parent” element in the taxonomy, and
this element has children that roll up to it, then one of the following will be
true:
·
All
“Income and Expense” of the entity must be recorded within one of those child elements,
OR
·
The
instance document will include an extension to the taxonomy that consists of a
new element or elements and an indication of how those new elements relate to “Income
and Expense”.
All of the elements in the fragment shown are of a data type “monetary”
with a weight of “1”. Having a weight of “1” indicates that the element values
of all children of an element, multiplied by the weight, then add up or “roll
up” to the value of the parent element. For example, “Income” and “Expenses” are
part of the make up of the value of “Income and Expenses”.
The taxonomy is laid out with parents coming
before children. For example, “Income and Expense” is presented before any
detail information about Income and Expenses itself such as “Income” and
“Expense”. This pattern is followed throughout the taxonomy.
This section of the USFR-GC Taxonomy contains the single element “Changes in Balances”. This element is necessary for collecting detailed elements in the Primary Terms (USFR-PT) Taxonomy related to the Cash Flow, whose items represent changes in assets, liabilities and equity.
This section of the USFR-GC Taxonomy contains Asset, Liability and Equity (i.e. Balance Sheet and Income and Expense (i.e. Income Statement) related high-level elements.
These exceptions require the use of
“same-as” links. The “same as” concept is part of XBRL 2.0a Specification, and
its interpretation is as follows: there will be an error if an instance document having two elements linked by a “same as”
definition relationship and which
have the same numeric context have different content values.
Specific to the USFR-GC Taxonomy, there are no equivalent facts that require the use of “same as” links.
For example, the USFR-GC Taxonomy uses the component
name “Income” to represent the concept “Income”. If the
The way this is done is that each
taxonomy has a unique namespace. A namespace is a URI (Uniform Resource
Identifier) such as http://www.xbrl.org/taxonomy/us/br/common/gc/2003-07-07, which is the namespace of this release
of the USFR-GC taxonomy. A namespace is not
a URL that one is meant to use with a browser; it is a simply a globally unique
identifier. Within any particular XML document, however, it is quite
unnecessary to repeat such a huge identifier with every taxonomy element –
instead, XML allows one to define an abbreviation for each of the namespaces
one uses. Using “qualified” namespaces in this way, instance documents and
taxonomies can define an alias such as usfr-gc
for the USFR-GC taxonomy, and uk-gc
for the UK-GC taxonomy. Thus the USFR-GC element would be referred to as usfr-gc:Income and the
Using qualified namespaces, the USFR-GC
Taxonomy “Income and Expenses” becomes usfr-gc:IncomeExpenses and the United
Kingdom Taxonomy’s would be uk-gc:IncomeExpenses. The namespace simply adds a contextual prefix to any given XML
element.
Note that these particular aliases reflect a usage convention only within the USFR-GC taxonomy itself as an aid to communication between humans. Software applications must not depend on these particular prefixes being used; they should process namespace identifiers and aliases as specified by the XML specifications.
Figure 5 describes how weights have been incorporated into the taxonomy and how corresponding values will most often be entered into an instance document: (note that the term “natural balance” is not used, this is intentional)
Figure 5: Numeric Values and Weights
Typical Balance |
Enter* |
|
Asset |
Debit |
Positive |
Liability & Equity |
Credit |
Positive |
Revenue |
Credit |
Positive |
Expense |
Debit |
Positive |
|
|
|
Other Income (Expenses) |
|
Positive or (Negative) |
|
|
|
Cash Inflows |
|
Positive |
Cash Outflows |
|
Positive |
|
|
|
Number of Employees |
|
Positive |
*Enter means enter into an instance document.
Please Note: This information is provided for reference purposes only. The USFR-GC Taxonomy is not typically used to create instance documents directly against or solely using it. Instead, industry taxonomies such as US GAAP CI combine both text-based and numeric elements and, as a result, typically are the focus of instance documents.
XBRL instance documents distinguish facts relating to different segments
of an entity in nonNumericContexts and numericContexts. For example, revenues
for the entire company, and segmented into revenues for the
This section is designed to provide guidance in reviewing this taxonomy. This will assist the user of this documentation and of the taxonomy as well as assisting in providing feedback to the XBRL US Domain Working Group and XBRL International. There are three levels of review
This is a high level review, undertaken with the objective of ensuring the taxonomy has not omitted any key sections. This contrasts with the Detailed Review, which is concerned with a line-by line analysis. If a crucial part of the taxonomy is missing, such as a specific aspect related to a general business reporting concept, this should be picked up in the Global Review. Knowledge of GAAP and Financial Reporting is required to undertake this review. It is intended to identify missing sections of the taxonomy rather than a missing element within a section. A question that would be asked in the Global Review might be “are there XBRL elements that capture necessary general business and reporting concepts information?” rather than validating each of the individual General Concept disclosures.
Other issues include:
Structure – nesting and completeness
Are the elements grouped in a sensible manner? To illustrate, this review would ask whether the elements that are nested under, for example, “Income and Expenses” are appropriate and complete. To answer this requires knowledge of the General Concepts and the content typically contained within.
Do the elements seem to roll up properly?
Is every child element correctly placed under the appropriate parent? Do the parents roll up to the correct “grandparents”? The focus on this review is to ensure that from a bottom-up perspective the taxonomy is structured in an appropriate fashion.
Consistency
Are elements aggregated in a consistent manner? There may be cases where some parent elements appear to have a disproportionate number of children, and therefore provide detail that is more appropriately included elsewhere in the USFR-GC Taxonomy.
The objective of the Detailed Review is to ensure the taxonomy correctly captures information typically related to high-level business and reporting concepts. It has two components, the first driven from GAAP and the second driven from XBRL.
Model
Report Review
This review involves validating the elements and disclosures in the taxonomy on a line-by-line basis against commonly used business and financial reports.
The accuracy is checked by reviewing the taxonomy against:
GAAP to XBRL
Reviewers should be able to identify an element in the taxonomy for every item required to be disclosed under GAAP. This requires a 100% mapping from GAAP to the USFR-GC Taxonomy. This includes checking all the appropriate GAAP references.
This review should ensure that the element list is sufficiently complete in relation to all of these matters.
XBRL to
GAAP
Not all elements in the Taxonomy will map directly to a GAAP disclosure requirement. Such elements should exist in the taxonomy because it is either 1) common practice for enterprises to disclose the fact or 2) the fact is a sub-total that helps the structural completeness of the taxonomy.
This review has an XBRL focus, and involves verifying some of the attributes of the elements. The principal attributes to be verified are weights, labels and data type.
Weights
Is the weight correct, so that the children correctly roll-up to the parent?
Labels
Label names should be consistent. For example, equity might be labeled as “Equity”. There should therefore be no cases of “Stockholder’s Equity” or any other variations. All abbreviations should also be consistent.
Data-Types
Is the element data-type correct? Valid data types include (but are not limited to) string, monetary, date, tuple and shares.
This section explains the naming
conventions created and used in the USFR-GC Taxonomy to associate digital
“tags” to concepts from the FASB Standards and other related materials. The
purpose of this “translation” is to provide a consistent, reliable,
language-independent, unambiguous way for relevant parties to use and integrate
XBRL standards into their software applications.
The following terms are used
throughout this section:
·
Component: A representation of a fact that
relates to the element or concept being described. This fact may represent,
among other things, an accounting term, an accounting concept, or a
GAAP-defined definition. Examples: [assets] = “Assets”; [Expenses] = “Expenses”.
·
Composite: A series of two or more components
joined together to make a complete element (“tag”) name. A composite represents
a more specific concept than a component. Also referred to as a composite
element name. Examples: [IncomeExpenses] = “Income and Expenses”; [AssetsLiabilitiesEquity]
= “Assets, Liabilities and Equity”.
·
Reference: A reference to literature that
supports the existence and necessity of a component and/or composite. Each
component and composite has at least one reference. Typically these refer to
chapter/subchapter/paragraphs/etc., as denoted in authoritative information
such as FASB and GAAP. However, other references may also be present.
·
Label: A label is text that describes a
component and/or composite to a user. A single component or composite may have
multiple labels, typically one per language, although a single language may
have multiple types of labels.
The
USFR-GC Taxonomy XBRL “element name” has been created using a Label CamelCase
Concatenation (LC3) convention. The base
for the element name is the label name for a given element. The label is a
natural language expression that is meaningful to experts in the domain of that
taxonomy (e.g., “IncomeExpense”, “ChangeInBalances”) for a given element. If multiple labels exist in one or more label
linkbases for that taxonomy, all element names in the taxonomy shall be derived
from a linkbase in the primary language of the taxonomy and will be consistent
with the label link having the highest assigned priority.
Specific requirements of the LC3 naming
convention are as follows:
·
The base for the element name is the label name for an
element. The label is a natural language expression that is meaningful to
experts in the domain of that taxonomy (e.g., “Revaluo Propio”, “Restatement of
Fixed Assets”) for a given element.
·
If multiple labels exist in one or more label linkbases
for that taxonomy, all element names in the taxonomy shall be derived from a
linkbase in the primary language of the taxonomy and will be consistent with
the label link having the highest assigned priority.
·
The first character of the element name must be
alphabetic.
·
The first alphabetic character of the element name shall
be capitalized.
·
Connective words in the label shall be omitted from the
element name, in order to make names shorter.
Connective words include (but are not limited to) the, and, to, for,
from, which, of
·
All special characters shall be omitted from the element
name. Special characters include, but
are not limited to; ( ) * +. [ ] ? \ / ^
{ } | @ # % ^ - _ = ~ ` “ ‘ ; : < > & $, ₤ €.
·
Element names shall be limited to 256 characters or fewer.
·
A list of standard abbreviations and rules for
substitution (e.g. “Property Plant and Equipment” always replaced by “PPE”)
will be maintained and consistently applied to labels when used in constructing
element names.
·
In the event that two or more elements share the same
element name and the element name is less that 256 characters, uniqueness shall
be accomplished by appending an additional distinguishing suffix word, or,
failing that, by appending the first duplicate name with a number, beginning
with 1 and incrementing by 1 for each element with a common name.
Composite Element Names are not Hierarchical in Nature
The order in which label “fragments”
are listed in a component in a composite element name are combined should not
be interpreted as a hierarchy. Although some composite element names may
“appear” to resemble this relationship, it is strictly coincidence and
unintentional. All components in a
composite element name are equal in stature, i.e., there is no implied
hierarchy within the composite element name. The hierarchy is expressed in the
XBRL linkbases.
All USFR-GC Taxonomy element names
contain a component that represents one of the concepts outlined in the FASB
FAS 6: Position (asset, liability, equity), performance (income, expense,
profit or loss), or cash flow (change in asset, liability, equity).
There are exceptions to this general
rule. One such example is when a fact that can be either income or expense
depending on circumstances represented by the instance document where it is
used. In this example, a third ‘state’ – income or expense – exists.
The USFR-GC taxonomy is a key component used to create industry-specific taxonomies such as the US GAAP CI taxonomy. As such, it is “imported” by other taxonomies like the US GAAP CI taxonomy instead of being used as a stand-alone taxonomy for creating instance documents. As such, sample instance documents are not provided for the USFR-GC taxonomy.
Version Number |
Version Date |
Modified By |
Changes Made |
1.0 |
|
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Original Version |
2.0 |
07-Jul-2003 |
Brad Homer |
Update personnel and hyperlinks to conform to new release of taxonomy. |
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This taxonomy will be updated with revisions for errors and new features within the following guidelines:
· Since financial statements created based on the USFR-GC Taxonomy must be available indefinitely, the taxonomy must be available indefinitely. All updates will take the form of new versions of the taxonomy with a different date. For example, the taxonomy http://www.xbrl.org/taxonomy/us/br/common/gc/2002-10-15/usfr-gc-2002-10-15.xsd will never change. New versions will be issued under a different name, such as http://www.xbrl.org/taxonomy/us/br/common/gc/2002-12-31/usfr-gc-2002-12-31.xsd. This will ensure that any taxonomy created will be available indefinitely.
The following information relating to this taxonomy will be accumulated:
If you wish to report an error, require a clarification or suggest a best practice, please provide feedback as indicated in the “Comments and Feedback” section of this document.
Comments and feedback on either accounting concepts contained in the USFR-GC Taxonomy or specific to the US Financial Reporting Taxonomy Framework are welcome, particularly ideas to improve this taxonomy. If you have a comment or feedback or wish to report an error, email comments to:
Jeff Naumann (jnaumann@aicpa.org)
Campbell
Pryde (cpryde@kpmg.com)
The
XBRL US Domain Working Group would like
to acknowledge the contributions of the following individuals for their work in
the creation of this taxonomy, and to their respective organizations who
provided the funds and time for their participation in and support of this
effort:
Name
|
Organization
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Accounting
Jurisdiction
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Rob Blake |
Microsoft |
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Amie Bothwell |
BearingPoint |
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Glen Buter |
BDO Seidman |
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Eric Cohen |
PwC |
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Michael Eng |
KPMG |
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George Farkas |
XBI Software Inc. |
Canada |
Herm Fisher |
UBmatrix |
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Gary Gannon |
UBmatrix |
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Clicia Guzzardo |
Morgan Stanley |
United States |
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Standard Advantage |
United States |
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UBmatrix |
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Louis Matherne |
AICPA |
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Sal Mileti |
Ernst & Young |
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Victor Mullings |
Bank of |
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Jeff Naumann |
AICPA |
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Paul Penler |
Ernst & Young |
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Campbell Pryde |
KPMG |
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Brad Saegesser |
Moody’s KMV |
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Morgan Stanley |
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Brian Staples |
Bank of America |
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Tom Taylor |
CICA |
Canada |
Phil Walenga |
FDIC |
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Hugh Wallis |
Hyperion |
United States |
Liv Watson |
EDGAROnline |
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PwC |
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A current list of corporate members of XBRL
International can be found at the XBRL International web site (www.xbrl.org).