STEP #1: COMPARISON OF ALL FILINGS. A filer should use all prior reports that they have filed to help them understand if a current report is CORRECT. Below you see 100% of the filings for Alaska Airlines. Notice how the filings are in descending order, most current filing first then descending to the first filing. Notice how EVERY FILING had an ERROR except for the LAST filing! I sent this information about this error to the Alaska Airlines investor relations department. They looked at the information I provided and determined that I was correct, agreeing with me that this was an error. They fixed the error and you can see ALL GREEN for the 10-K filing. Further, any FUTURE filing should be ALL GREEN for ALL TESTS for the minimum criteria.
STEP #2: Detailed Comparison Across All Filings for an Entity. I think that you would agree that actually "seeing the numbers" has a significantly more profound impact on understanding THAT an issue exists and HOW TO FIX an issue. This report below is for ONE SECTION of a financial report, in this case the BALANCE SHEET. This report is driven by the fundamental accounting concepts metadata. This is how SECXBRL.info is rendering this. The report is 100% generated from the FAC metadata which is 100% XBRL-based in the newest version that I am creating and which you should use.
STEP #3: Peer Comparison: EVERY company has peers. Peers might be other companies in the industry the reporting entity is on or really any reporting entity that uses the same reporting style. CLEARLY if two different public companies report the same information the representation of that information should be EXACTLY THE SAME at the high level of the fundamental accounting concepts. If this is NOT THE CASE, then there should be a SPECIFIC REASON for the difference; that might result in (a) a NEW reporting style should be created or (b) some error in the mappings, impute rules, or other fundamental accounting concept metadata should be fixed, or (c) some issue exists in the US GAAP XBRL Taxonomy exists and should be fixed. There are NO OTHER REASONS that an inconsistency would result; either the filer made a mistake, the testing metadata has a mistake, or the US GAAP XBRL Taxonomy has a mistake.
There is NO BETTER WAY to see if you are doing something correctly than to see how other similar reporting entities are doing something. This report shows this comparison, again at the DETAILED LEVEL of the high-level summary information which should ALWAYS be consistent; this peer comparison helps reporting entities KEEP the information consistent. Every company should be mapped to some number of peers, and then BEFORE a filing is filed that filing is compared to those peers to make sure the customer filing has no mistakes.
The following diagram maps the minimum criteria tests to columns in the filing report.
The following is a listing of the minimum criteria tests. (Note that the fundamental accounting concept replations tests are PART OF the minimum criteria.)
Period comparisons can be done for EVERY fundamental accounting concept relation.
Key to driving the PERIOD and PEER comparisons is the fundamental accounting concept relations consistency rules.