gnucash-ixbrl 1.1.0

Production of iXBRL reports from GnuCash accounts

gnucash-ixbrl

Introduction

This is a utility which allows accounts managed by the excellent GnuCash accounting software to be presented as iXBRL report output. iXBRL is commonly used to describe regulatory account information which companies must publish annually. Different schemas are in use in different places in the world. The example account and report data included in this project uses schemas which are used in the UK reporting regime.

iXBRL stands for "Inline XBRL". It was inspired by the XBRL standard (Extensible Business Reporting Language). iXBRL is HTML with embedded XBRL tags so that the document can be viewed in an HTML browser and read by a human, but the tags are also machine-readable. This allows the same accounts to be usable by a human, and also by automated data extraction tools.

Included in this repo are example accounts and configuration files exist which output:

• Company accounts for UK Companies House filing using the FRS-101 taxonomy.
• UK HMRC corporation tax filing using the CT600 schema and Detailed Profit and Loss schema in a single document.
• UK HMRC detailed-profit-and-loss filing using the DPL schema.

With the right configuration files, other taxonomies would work, the configuration files are complex to write. This code is all command line, and largely only work in Linux.

Incidentally, plain-text report output is also supported as a byproduct of creating the reports. This is useful in the workflow of constructing report configuration.

Motivation

The overheads in configuring report and iXBRL output with gnucash-ixbrl is not small, but that's an up-front cost.

The motivation is that once set up, it is trivial to generate reports, with the latest, accurate information without constantly copying boiler-plate text into reports. It isn't difficult to generate reports dynamically. Automating business report for low on-going costs, and real-time delivery of information.

Warranty

This code comes with no warranty whatsoever. See the LICENSE file for details. Further, I am not an accountant. It is possible that this code could be useful to you in meeting regulatory reporting requirements for your business. It is also possible that the software could report misleading information which could land you in a lot of trouble if used for regulatory purposes. Really, you should check with a qualified accountant.

Configuration overview

gnucash-ixbrl is not simple to configure. If the configuration files supplied work for your business (and you should assume that they won't), you could get accounts with little work.

However, it is very likely that you'll need to tailor the reports to work with your business. This configuration is not trivial. It is described in Configuration Workflow.

Installing

There is a dependency on the gnucash Python module, which cannot be installed from PyPI. See https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Python_Bindings for installation. On Linux (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora), the Python modules are available on package repositories. MacOS and Windows builds of GnuCash are reportedly not shipping with Python APIs at the moment.

pip3 install git+https://github.com/cybermaggedon/gnucash-ixbrl

Usage

gnucash-ixbrl <config> <report> <format>

Where:

• config specifies a configuration file. See Configuration File.
• report specifies a report tag.
• format specifies output format. text outputs plain text, ixbrl outputs iXBRL (XHTML tagged with XBRL tags) and html outputs HTML, which is iXBRL with the XBRL tags removed.

The examples use files in the git repo. Clone the git repo to run this stuff.

Example, Companies House accounts. You should be able to view the resultant HTML in a browser.

gnucash-ixbrl company-accounts.yaml report ixbrl > out.html

Corporation tax filing:

gnucash-ixbrl corporation-tax.yaml report ixbrl > ct600.html

Detailed profit-and-loss:

gnucash-ixbrl profit-and-loss.yaml report ixbrl > dpl.html

Configuration

There are two configuration files: the configuration file you specify on the command line specifies the report structure. It references a taxonomy configuration file which specifies the schema and field mappings.

Both configuration files are YAML.

See Configuration File.

Screenshots of output

Screenshots

Other things to try

Having created iXBRL, you can try loading into Arelle which is an iXBRL development tool. In Arelle, you can invoke a validation and check the output matches the schema.

Once Arelle is installed, you can install the Workiva ixbrl-viewer. When an iXBRL document is loaded into Arelle, the document is automatically loaded into a browser with markup so that you can navigate the tags and discover tagged information. With the iXBRL viewer when you hover over tagged information, it is highlighted, clicking opens up the metadata viewer.