Retrieving Financial Information in XBRL on the Next-Generation Edgar

Abstract

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has upgraded the old Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval (EDGAR) system, to the Interactive Data Electronic Applications (IDEA) platform, or the Next-Generation EDGAR (New EDGAR). In January 2009, the SEC issued its final mandate for XBRL adoption and the conversion target dates for all firms. This conversion enables users to retrieve listed companies’ financial statement information at both document level and data element level. This paper reviews the basic concepts of XBRL, reports the current compliance status of the SEC XBRL conversion mandate. The main contribution of this article is to demonstrate how to retrieve data from the New EDGAR and process them with Microsoft Excel 2013.