ISBN 9783843956741

978-3-8439-5674-1, Reihe Wirtschaftswissenschaften

Jahn Markus Rührig
Machine-Readable Financial Reporting

119 Seiten, Dissertation Technische Universität München (2025), Softcover, A5

Zusammenfassung / Abstract

For decades financial reporting of publicly traded companies was performed in humanreadable formats. As a result investors, auditors, regulatory agencies and others needed to spend countless hours to import, interpret and double-check the reported information in order to use it in their internal tools. After more than 20 years of XBRL and years after making iXBRL the mandatory reporting format in the majority of western countries, this thesis reviews the prevalence of XBRL and advertises measures to improve it. The thesis is structured into two main parts. The first part investigates the relevance, free availability and data quality of XBRL with the example of the 40 German DAX companies. To do this the historical filing behavior on Government Registers and investor relations websites was analyzed and compared. The findings indicate that XBRL suffers from a low prevalence outside the professional accounting community. To showcase the benefits of XBRL, the DAX filings of 2023 were used in a demonstration of new evaluation methods. Detailed statistical information on the filing content and the adherence to the IFRS accounting standard were extracted for all 40 DAX companies. One of the core achievements of this thesis is the creation of an open-source software that calculates financial ratios from iXBRL filings in a fully automated way. This software is designed to improve the prevalence of XBRL, because it provides a tangible benefit over predominant PDF format, especially for non-professional investors.