Creating and exporting XBRL files from Arelle

[José Zavala González]

Hi everyone! I'm glad to see there's a community for working with Arelle. I am wondering if anyone knows what are the limitations of Arelle to create an XBRL and export it. Context is we are digitizing PDF financial statements from government entities and we would like to export an XBRL file as the output. Arelle's strengths are parsing and validation, but any feedback for how to approach this use case would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

[Austin Matherne]

Hi Jose,

Can you provide more specifics about your objectives? It appears that you're trying to convert these PDFs into tagged XBRL reports. Although this isn't a task Arelle specializes in, many service providers can assist you with this.

[André Salerno, MSc]

Hi,

I’m a newbie with Arelle and I would like to know how it works…..for example based on specific template (I’m thinking in Brazil Financial Statements) what exactly the steps? How I could create a new one?

Tks

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André Salerno Enviado de meu iPhone

[José Zavala González]

Yep. That sounds about right. Specifically we're starting off with the "Statement of Revenues, Expenditures, and Changes in Fund Balances - Governmental Funds" statement since it's roughly tabular enough that a spreadsheet could fit it. However we do lose a lot of context that XBRL provides so we're looking into if we can take the numbers from the PDF and "tag" them as corresponding to some concept, domain, etc. For reference, here is a screenshot of an Excel we've made from a PDF:

From the column named "stub" we can guess the concept that it's referring to but we do lose the hierarchy between them. Moreso, it's tougher to compare a sequence of statements if one of these stub name changes by a typo whereas XBRL just defines exactly what it refers to.

Any direction you can point us in is greatly appreciated. Thank you for your time!

[Austin Matherne]

Arelle doesn't directly cater to report creation, but your endeavor seems in line with recent efforts by XBRL US to convert data from disparate sources into XBRL. They have an established Arelle plugin named XULE that aids in formulating XBRL validation rules, and of late, they've been developing another plugin called XINCE to enable mapping of data from different sources into XBRL. Though I haven't personally utilized it, you might find it beneficial to explore that avenue.

https://github.com/xbrlus/xule

https://xbrl.us/xule/xince/

in...@xbrl.us

Austin Matherne

Workiva Inc. | Arelle Team | Staff Software Engineer

[José Zavala González]

Thank you!! I'll look into it. It seems that they recently started integrating XINCE into the XULE repository itself. I'll look into the github you linked and go from there. Have a nice day!