Is Cognos TM1 an XBRL product?

[Byron Hsu]

Hi, I have a question. Is the TM1 an XBRL product?

XBRL — eXtensible Business Reporting Language — a language for the electronic communication of business and financial data is revolutionising business reporting around the world.

[Martin Ryan]

revolutionising business reporting around the world.

Marketers do my head in. Instead of saying what their new fandangled thing does they tell us that it's changing the world. Awesome, good work, so what exactly does it do then?

I've never heard of XBRL before and from what a quick scan of the Wikipedia article tells me, no, TM1 is not an XBRL product.

Slicing reportings into Excel will do the same thing from what I can see, and a lot faster too.

Cheers,
Martin

[David Usherwood]

I've heard of it ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XBRL ). It's been touted as a game changer/paradigm shift for some time, but is going quite slowly in practice. Since it's just a mapping, albeit in XML, yes, I agree, you could probably do it. Might be worth looking at XL2007's support for XML to see if that would help.

[dkleist]

I think Cognos Finance and Controller are the only two products currently supporting XBRL. My guess is that it is a bit difficult to incorporate without some inherent financial structuring inside the product (e.g. what's an account, debit, credit, etc)

[David Usherwood]

Doesn't have to be inherent. TM1 is used for financial reporting all the time. So it really comes down to a mapping exercise. Which is not to say that getting the right format out would be terribly simple, though (as I said) XL2007 might ease the process. If I knew more about the new features I could be more specific, but I simply hate the way M$ hid all the menu options I use all the time, so I keep 2003 lying around for 'real work'.

[rollo19]

Byron you might want to check out Cognos Controller - in partnership with Symansys they are able to deliver an XBRL Reporting tool.
Marting I found this useful on XBRL: http://www.journalofaccountancy.com/Iss ... asyWay.htm

I imagine IBM are looking at it but to me, TM1 looks like a candidate for someone to build an XBRL reporting add-on. e.g. Taking the TM1 mdx'ish tuple expression: ['Period', 'Account'... etc] and parsing into XBRL speak like <ifrs-gp:OtherAdministrativeExpenses contextRef="J2004"... given an XBRL schema
Even more powerful with TM1's write back capability, would be the ability to receive XBRL feeds intoTM1.. without using some Excel add-in.
IBM could then publish TM1 financial reporting model blueprints around the various taxonomies for us to pick up and use.

For now I guess, those with TM1 may be able to achieve something using the XBRL add-in for MS Excel http://www.microsoft.com/office/solutio ... L_300K.asx
Anyone done/doing this??

[Byron Hsu]

thanks all.

Byron

[JamesM]

The IBM Cognos Controller uses Symansys as stated in a previous post. Symansys is simply an XBRL reporting tool where you select a data source, download a taxonomy in which you are going to report (i.e. IFRS, UK GAAP, US GAAP, etc) the it creates the XBRL report for you. If you have your data in TM1 and output the information to a csv file or use an excel report this can then be used as a source for Semansys XBRL reporter and hence create your XBRL reports.

[Levinen]

There is a TM1 based XBRL solution. Please send me a msg with contact details

[august12010]

Take a look at this- CLARITY FSR :
CLARITY FSR offers the most advanced XBRL solution on the market today. By integrating XBRL into the external reporting process, CLARITY FSR makes the tagging, validation and creation of XBRL documents dramatically more efficient and less error prone.
Unique Tag OnceTM technology Seamless integration with source data Audit trail Collaboration Workflow management Financial rounding
http://www.claritysystems.com/us/produc ... /XBRL.aspx