XBRL Data Mapping: WIP Taxonomy

The usefulness of the XBRL standard reaches far beyond SEC requirements for filing financial statements. Organizations such as XBRL.US and XBRL International are working to develop XBRL taxonomies and accompanying software solutions for countless other practical applications where standardizing data submission results in increased accuracy and productivity for all involved – for report filing, data analysis, and beyond.

One such project is the Work in Progress (WIP) Taxonomy created by XBRL.US for the surety industry. The new taxonomy helps save time and increase accuracy for report submission, and at the same time enables new opportunities for data analysis and decision making.

What is the WIP Taxonomy?

The surety underwriting process relies in part on Work In Progress reports, which describe the financial status and progress of a contractor’s construction project. Prior to the WIP Taxonomy, the reporting process was manual, that is, time consuming, error prone, and costly on multiple fronts.

With the WIP Taxonomy, contractors can use software such as Excel plugins to enter their WIP reports, and the plugin will automatically save the data as XBRL for submission. This saves time and allows for data validation.

Once the data is in XBRL, it’s easy to map it to relational databases or other systems for intricate analysis. We recently demonstrated such a project using Altova MapForce for graphical XBRL data mapping.

This presentation includes more information on how the WIP Taxonomy is structured and how easy it is to map the XBRL data to a database as reports arrive.

Free Webinar: XBRL Data Mapping

Learn more about the WIP taxonomy and mapping XBRL data during the free XBRL.US webinar “Data Standards in Surety Underwriting: Technical Review” recorded on March 3, 2016.