|
[Print-friendly version]
The Integration of Workflow Technology and XBRL
Yuan Ren
Master Confirmation Seminar
Abstract
Workflow technology is widely used for improving the productivity of organizations. It automates organizational procedures and knowledge and is designed to assist people in carrying out work more effectively and efficiently. The eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) is a language for the electronic communication of business and financial data. It provides major benefits in the analysis, communication and preparation of business information.
Organizations produce reports to exchange information. Using the XBRL standard to format reports between organizations could not only increase productivity in the workplace, but could also help to eliminate user frustration. There are two aspects to the standardization offered by XBRL: they are the use of XML and the use of officially recognized taxonomies. Report data exchanged between different organizations is usually considerable. Therefore, by exchanging XBRL-format reports, the organizations can process data from other organizations immediately after the reports are received. This improves productivity by not having to manually input data into another system. XBRL can increase the speed of handling of financial data, reduce the chances of error, and permit automatic checking of information. However, current workflow systems do not yet support XBRL.
This research aims to make the data and resource perspectives of workflow systems compliant with appropriate taxonomies. This research should lead to two main contributions: improving knowledge sharing and increasing the expressiveness of workflow systems. YAWL is a reference implementation of the state of the art in workflow systems. To prove the validity of the integration, YAWL will be extended to take any relevant XBRL taxonomy into account. Thus, at the end of this project, the data and resource perspectives of YAWL will support XBRL
|
