Notice two important things. First, notice that no information is missing. Why? The reason is that all this information is REQUIRED and there is no flexibility as to which concepts are to be used. This is NOT to say that all information should be required. This is to point out that if information is required, it is always consistent. Second, there are no computations and therefore the relationships are 'sound' because there are no relationships.
The balance sheet starts showing some basic, straight-forward relations. Assets=Current assets + Noncurrent assets; Liabilities=Current liabilities + Noncurrent liabilities; Liabilities and equity = Liabilities + Equity; Assets = Liabilities and equity. How do you know if you made a data input error? With business rules enforcing relations, software can check the relations. Can software detect EVERY error? No. If you transposed the values for Current assets and Noncurrent assets, software could not detect that error.
Notice on the cash flow statement that all cash inflows are represented as POSITIVE numbers and all cash outflows are represented as NEGATIVE numbers. All companies are side-by-side and all this information needs to be standard so that it is constent, rather than each individual company arbitrarily representing information however they like. US GAAP XBRL Taxonomy rules and other business rules enforce the standard approach. Machine-readable business rules make sure the standard is followed.
What if a company does not have any other comprehensive income? Notice that about half of the Dow 30 companies, comprehensive income and net income (loss) are the same and no other comprehensive income is reported. If no other comprehensive income is reported, one would expect net income (loss) and comprehensive income (loss) to be the same.
Facts can be derived from other reported facts. How do you know derived facts are arrived at? Business rules can be used to document this information.
It is just as easy to compare across periods as it is to compare across entities. Most of the other comparisons are for the DOW 30. Here, information for one entity is shown across periods.
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