The Brix Project

The Brix Project is building a simple demonstration model of something revolutionary: XBRL.

With Brix, you can instantly search, access and share public company SEC filings now being submitted in XBRL. Moments after being submitted to the SEC as a document, it is in your hand as data.

This is made possible by a technology standard called XBRL being used to organize pages and pages of numbers, text, tables, and footnotes that make up large and complex financial and business reports into a standard document format that can be read by people, processed by software, fed into databases, opened in spreadsheets… and now, delivered to your iPhone, ready to view or share.

XBRL US Labs developed Brix as part of an ongoing research and development program to advance this technology for more accessible, more usable, and more transparent business and government reporting. The Labs team has been working together since a successfully crowd-sourced effort to develop a 15,000 tag dictionary (taxonomy) of virtually every fact found in public company financial statements, including those defined in Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP).

First released for public review and comment in 2007, the taxonomy is now required by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for public companies (6-K, 8-K, 10-K, 10-Q, 20-F) regulatory compliance and in the summer of 2009, the first companies filed their XBRL documents under the three-year phase-in of the mandate. As of July 1, 2010, over 500 companies filed some XBRL 2,000 reports.

Brix uses the XBRL to unlock the data in those documents, so you can search, view, and share it as data within moments of the document being filed on the SEC’s EDGAR system. Despite the real-time nature of the data, the purpose is purely one of demonstration and education, and still very much a work in progress. It allows you to:

• Search for companies, XBRL tags, and reports filed with the SEC
• List reports as they are filed in real time and receive alerts
• Find out which tags are being used – and by which companies
• Email any document in an XBRL report as an Excel attachment
• Learn: how it works, who’s behind it, and how to get involved

XBRL US is committed to driving innovation and adoption in the market, developing high-quality, royalty-free, and open source taxonomies for public use.

We’re equally committed to supporting and driving adoption with strong marketing and communications, professional development and education programs, and services that introduce and facilitate best practices and deliver the benefits of best-of-breed data standards: higher data quality, lower costs, and faster turnaround times.

Now, the rate of XBRL adoption by capital markets and governments around the world is accelerating with heightened concerns over systemic risk, calls for greater transparency, and a movement towards regulatory reform. XBRL already helps regulators in the U.S. and Spain track banking institutions, streamlines UK and Japanese taxforms, measures environmental sustainability in Amsterdam, reduces regulatory burden in Australia, and helps global companies overcome the “Excel Hell” endemic in data-rich management environments in offices around the world.

Business reporting isn’t just numbers and regulatory compliance either. XBRL Labs has developed, and is developing, public taxonomies for corporate actions, proxy, foundation grants, and mortgage data as well. So, if this app strikes a chord, and you’re looking for a chance to make the future better, this is it.

Interested? We’re always looking to expand the expertise and creativity of the Labs crowd. If you’ve got an idea of how to improve the Brix experience and induce some “aha” moments among people seeking to understand XBRL, or see new possibilities for this technology worth exploring, let us know with an email to XBRL US Labs, at labs@xbrl.us