ROCKVILLE, Md., Sept. 24, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Dinocrates Group today announced the company was awarded a contract to support the state of Florida’s financial reporting modernization efforts. Dinocrates will support Florida by leveraging the Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) to create new standardized taxonomies for the new Florida Open Financial System.
The goal of this work is twofold. First, Florida wants to make it as easy as possible for local government entities to submit required annual financial reports. Second, they want the submitted data to be in a format that computer programs can use to further dissect and report on the data so the state has the best possible understanding of how the state’s funds are being used.
The XBRL standard is used across the globe and will be a valuable asset to Florida as it undertakes this modernization effort to comply with Florida’s House Bill (HB) 1073, which revised section 218.32 of Florida Statutes and requires the Florida chief financial officer to create an interactive repository of financial statement information for their annual financial report (or CAFR). The repository, now under development, is known as the Florida Open Financial Statement System, and must be able to provide financial reporting capabilities by September 1, 2022.
“The more financial information is standardized, the more valuable it becomes for an organization,” said Tom Prokop, chief executive officer for the Dinocrates Group. “Once XBRL is implemented in Florida, the Florida Department of Finance, will be able to interact with the information provided by local government entities in much more compelling ways. Once completed, financial reporting will be much easier, and even more importantly, it will be able to deliver much more insight into how the state is being run because Florida will better be able to analyze the information and provide it to the stakeholders who need it.”
In partnership with the Netherlands-based Visma, Dinocrates will design the required XBRL taxonomy and assess the current state of Florida reporting systems for implementation. Visma Connect is Europe’s leader in XBRL and standardized business reporting (SBR) implementation and manages over 800,000 XBRL messages and transactions for the Dutch government.
“Dinocrates is excited to partner with Visma Connect,” said Jim St. Clair, Dinocrates’ chief technology officer. “Visma has been a leader in Europe for over a decade in assisting government agencies with standardized business reporting. XBRL has been implemented more widely overseas, and Visma’s expertise in large XBRL implementations strongly complements our experience in state and local government in the United States. Together, we will help the State of Florida achieve significant business efficiencies and promote financial transparency.”
The Benefits of XBRL in Florida
Using XBRL, Florida can further automate its data collection processes in a machine-readable format while also making information submission and analysis more comprehensive. State and local divisions using different accounting systems will be able to assemble the needed financial data in a format that can be submitted to the Department of Finance in a format that cuts down on the time-consuming and error-prone manual processes currently in use.
XBRL also benefits the Department of Finance as the recipient of the standardized data. Once received, software can validate the data and highlight errors or gaps to address. Because the data will be machine-readable, software and machine learning can take over many of the previously manual tasks and free human effort to focus on the more value-added tasks such as analysis, review and decision making.
About Dinocrates Group
Dinocrates is a boutique strategy and technology advisory firm that is headquartered in Rockville, MD and partners with clients from the public and private sectors to identify their highest-value opportunities, address their most critical challenges, and transform their enterprises.
About Visma Connect
Visma Connect supplies: payment services, information portals and middleware. Our experts are specialized in payments, standard business reporting, blockchain and artificial intelligence. Visma Connect was established in 2006 as EBPI, and since 2019 has been part of the Visma Group.
Contact:
Jim Lubinskas
Spire Communications for Dinocrates Group LLC
(703) 907-9103
jlubinskas@spirecomm.com
Sicco Brakema
Visma Connect
+31 6 58 81 14 56
sicco.brakema@visma.com