Financial Statement Notes

Background

Accurately extracting financial statement notes from financial reports is a challenging task because companies tend to use different terminologies to describe footnotes. The XBRL mandate alleviates this challenge by requiring companies to tag each footnote in its entirety using, when available, standardized TextBlock tags. For example, the most common fair value TextBlock tag is ”us-gaap:FairValueDisclosuresTextBlock” which appears across 73% of firms that report fair value (Ahn et al. 2020).

To assist researchers that are interested in textual data on financial statement notes, we provide TextBlock data. For more details on the data, please refer to the “TextBlock data dictionary.docx” and the “TextBlock Categories.xlsx” files.  

Relevant papers that use XBRL TextBlocks:

If you decide to use the data, please consider citing one of the following papers. These papers explain and/or use XBRL TextBlock tags:

Ahn, J., R. Hoitash, and U. Hoitash. 2020. Auditor Task-Specific Expertise: The Case of Fair Value Accounting. The Accounting Review, May 2020, Vol. 95, No. 3, pp. 1-32.

Ahn, J., R. Hoitash, and U. Hoitash. 2020. Examining the Joint Disclosure of Text and Numbers in Complex Financial Statement Notes.

Hoitash, R., U. Hoitash, and L. Morris. 2021. eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL): A Review and Implications for Future Research. Forthcoming, Auditing: A Journal of Practice and Theory.

Below we provide links to footnote text data and several related documents