In the field of accounting informationization, the establishment and development of XBRL has aroused wide concerns. Abandoning the constrain of the conventional theoretical study, this paper is based on the case of applying XBRL in Eastern Airlines (abbr. CEAIR) to integrate theory with practice. The authors researched the extension of the general taxonomy in specific industry, described the obstacles during the operation and the achievement it would obtain, as well as the valuable experience.
As a milestone and a new start of Chinese accounting informationization, the XBRL General Taxonomy was released by the National Standardization Management Committee and the Ministry of Finance on Oct 19, 2010, which laid the foundation for establishing a scientific, sound and globally accepted accounting standards system in China [
The organizational structure of CEAIR is very special (as shown in
CEAIR is a corporation listed in the three markets. Its governance structure is very complex. It is difficult to translate the data in the ERP system to the format of XBRL due to the complex structure of CEAIR. Although the ERP data can be automatically transformed to XBRL data through data interface, it does not work in some of the business department and subsidiaries since they are not applied to ERP software. Thus it requires a large amount of manual input because of the poor readability of these unstructured financial data.
In general, there are three modes to achieve XBRL financial reporting.The first is using corporate information system such as ERP systems in which the direct output is printed document or PDF file which cannot be directly converted and used. Instead, manual input is required to form XBRL files in accordance with the formation of the XBRL documents when converting. Manual inputting in this mode also increases the risk of data errors. The risk of errors and high cost caused by manual entry will deteriorated the actual application value in this mode [
The second mode is to form a variety of financial statements by the enterprise information system itself such as ERP system. And these financial statements can be stored in the form of electronic documents such as Excel or Word. When the XBRL statements are required by the relevant securities institutions or banks, they can be converted by XBRL format converter in accordance with the corresponding taxonomies and the instance document requirements. Although this mode is currently the main application one in the practical application, it is only a transitional stage for the future development of data. XBRL will be the future data form in enterprise, thus all valuable data (including general ledger data) will be transformed into XBRL form [
In the third mode, the enterprise’s own ERP system is integrated with XBRL adapter. Therefore, the financial report processing can be completed during information processing in accordance with XBRL standard.
Meantime, the XBRL documents can be output in real time.
The application of such mode requires a new version of ERP software with an embedded XBRL adapter developed by the original ERP system vendors. In the new ERP system, extraction and conversion to XBRL metadata are completed in all aspects of the business processing, and the standard XBRL documents will be generated timely according to the XBRL taxonomy, for instance, the financial statements requirements. Among all modes, the third one is the best mode for the application of XBRL financial reporting, but also the most difficult one to be achieved [
This project adopted the third mode, in which XBRL is completely embedded in the new ERP system to realize the standardization and intelligentization of all data.
First of all, CEAIR identified specific objectives on the implementation of XBRL:
1) Extend the CEAIR’s CAS taxonomy;
2) Dock the interface between the Oracle ERP system data and the audit report, and extract the part of data automatically;
3) Expand the taxonomy of branch companies and subsidiaries on the basis of CAS, and make the audit report classified by using the technology of XBRL;
4) Conbine the data of branch companies and subsidiary companies, and produce the financial statement data for disclosure to public;
5) Achieve intelligent analysis of financial data for management and help their effective decision-making.
Secondly, the group of CEAIR XBRL project proposed the effective solution on difficulties and obstacles on XBRL research. Following is the specific steps of CEAIR XBRL implementation (as shown in