An XML schema design framework to simplify financial statement validation

Financial statements share a common directed tree model. This common structure simplifies validation of financial statement instance documents and has important implications for the design of business reporting markup languages. Exploiting this a common structure enables different financial statements to share the same validation routine, thereby realizing considerable savings in development and maintenance of validation applications. This paper derives a common schema for financial statements based on a standard directed tree model, and demonstrates its contributions towards standardizing and simplifying validation of financial statements. This efficient framework of taxonomy development can be applied to other domains because many non-financial business documents also have a hierarchical structure expressible as a directed tree.