1. Working with Disclosure Management for Narrative Reporting
  2. Publishing Disclosure Management Reports
  3. Generating Instance Documents

Generating Instance Documents

Whereas a taxonomy defines XBRL concepts and their relationship to other concepts, the instance document is a report containing the actual data. There is a tight relationship between taxonomies and instance documents. After a taxonomy is created, you can use its definitions and their relationships to produce an XBRL report. In addition to taxonomy references, instance documents also contain the following information:

  • XBRL Context—Provides information about the reporting (business) entity, a time-frame, and other optional details such as scenarios and dimensions.

  • XBRL Unit—Describes what the numeric data represents. Examples of units are: "US Dollars," "Euros," and "shares."

  • Data—Instance documents contain numeric and/or textual data that reside within a Microsoft Office document. The generic "document data" term can mean one cell in Excel, or one word or entire paragraph in Microsoft Word. This term is used throughout to mean data that can be mapped by the Disclosure Management Mapping Tool. Additionally, numeric data can be scaled and have references to footnotes.

The instance document is similar to an HTML Web page, but instead of the report language being HTML that can be read by a browser, the language is XML read by a variety of XBRL applications that consume and analyze instance documents.

The XBRL filing consists of the XBRL taxonomy and the instance document. The XBRL taxonomy explains the metadata behind a company's disclosure, and the instance document shows how facts are mapped to the taxonomy. Validation verifies semantic relationships between concepts, confirming that the correct facts have been mapped to the correct fact field in the base taxonomy. For example, validation verifies that the facts filed for "Assets" equals the facts filed for "Liabilities" and the "Owner's equities". XBRL instance document generation is the last step of generating the XBRL-compliant disclosures. To ensure the accuracy of the XBRL data that is submitted in a filing, Disclosure Management validates your taxonomy against XBRL taxonomy specifications before creating the instance document.

Rendering the Instance Document

Disclosure Management performs detections on automatic taxonomies, multiple taxonomies, and IFRS based reports and processes rendering different based on the results.

Automatic Taxonomies

Disclosure Management attempts to discover the taxonomy that is associated with an instance document by reading the schema reference (SchemaRef) attribute within the instance document. When detected, the attribute is used to render the instance document using the Arelle Viewer (when available). When the taxonomy cannot be detected, the user is prompted to provide the path or URL for the taxonomy.

Multiple Taxonomies

When an instance document contains references to two or more taxonomies, Disclosure Management attempts to load the taxonomies declared by the multiple schemaRef attributes and renders the instance in the Arelle Viewer (when available).

IFRS-Based Report

After the Generate XBRL option is triggered, if an IFRS-based report is detected, it is automatically shown in the Arelle Viewer (when available).

The following usage notes apply to IFRS-based reports:

  • Many international taxonomies extend the IFRS taxonomy including the UK-IFRS and Chilean taxonomies.

  • Only the following versions of the IFRS taxonomy are currently recognized: 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2006 and 2005. IFRS taxonomies prior to the 2005 version are not supported.

  • Disclosure Management cannot control the final rendering of instance documents (this includes US GAAP based instance documents).