Sphinx® – business rules for business experts

Sphinx is an XBRL rules creation language that can be used by auditors, regulators, analysts and business report preparers. It can help to protect and enhance the quality and compliance of your data.

Rapid creation of business and accounting rules

Sphinx business rules help you within your enterprise:

Develop quality rules that stop errors at their source
Define compliance rules that allow anomalies to be flagged instantly
Identify problems with information before it is relied upon

Best of all, Sphinx is for the business expert, not IT experts and programmers!

Regulators can use Sphinx to rapidly identify problems

Sphinx is in use today amongst major regulators that rely on the language to capture bad data before it gets into their systems, and to identify anomalies the moment the data arrives.

Examples of typical usage include:

Ensuring that required data items are incorporated in a file
Ensuring that co-constraints are enforced (if you report X, you must also report Y)
Comparing data across dimensions

Sphinx rules are authored in an optional SpiderMonkey module. Typically, the rules run server side, to control workflow or some other process. In many scenarios they can be applied again, within Magnify, CoreFiling’s desktop XBRL and iXBRL review tool, which allows reviewers and examiners to record their findings and make appropriate decisions. Alternatively, rules validation can be achieved using True North or the True North Web Services Processor, for example when these products are used within a regulatory submission gateway.

Accountants and corporates can use Sphinx to minimise unnecessary enquiries.

Leading accounting firms responsible for XBRL and iXBRL filings, or for the independent review of their client filings, increasingly want to develop their own sets of rules to check the quality and consistency of those documents. Sphinx turns this into reality that they can manage and control themselves.

A number of firms in the UK and the US are today using the combined power of Magnify and Sphinx to ensure that their clients don’t file documents that contain errors, omissions or inconsistent data.

Analysts can use Sphinx to identify performance issues.

End users of XBRL data can develop “screens” of Sphinx rules to capture data quality issues at an early stage and so eradicate them from their models as well as to automatically identify aspects of corporate performance that they find of interest. Analysts and large investment firms are rapidly investing in systems and processes that consume and analyse XBRL data. Sphinx is a key part of the picture.