What kind of resource requirement (time and personnel) should I anticipate to prepare the initial XBRL file for an earnings release, 10-Q or 10-K?
The amount of time required to create an XBRL document depends ultimately on the amount of data being tagged. If a company is focused on formatting just their facing financial statements (Income Statement, Balance Sheet, Cash Flow and Statement of Equity), the amount of time required is much less than tagging an entire 10-K (including both financial statements and non-financial information such as Notes to the Financials). In general, tagging just the facing financial statements takes approximately 20-40 hours to do the very first time, with an additional 8-10 hours for management/audit to review/certify the financial statements. The hour estimate is based on a user who’s preparing XBRL for the first time, who’s looking at an XBRL taxonomy (such as US GAAP CI) for the first time, but has in-depth knowledge of the corporate data being converted into XBRL. The majority of the user’s time is spent familiarizing themselves with a given XBRL taxonomy and the concept/creating of a company ex
