On June 4, 2025, the University of Michigan’s CLOSUP team and the Michigan Open Source Software (MOSS) initiative hosted a Zoom webinar on Digitizing municipal financial reporting: A new open source tool for Excel - XBRL conversion. The speakers were Katrina Wheelan (Master's Student, Ford School of Public Policy) & Justin Hughes (Chief Operating Officer, DAC Bond, LLC).
The Financial Data Transparency Act (FDTA) will require many municipal governments to modernize their financial reporting using new digital data standards developed by regulators. However, many smaller municipal governments and debt issuers are worried about the costs and burdens of new regulations. The University of Michigan Center for Local, State, and Urban Policy (CLOSUP) teamed up with DAC Bond to develop a free, open source proof of concept tool that will allow users to convert the data in their Annual Comprehensive Financial Reports from Excel/Word format into XBRL, a leading open source data standard for financial reporting.
The MOSS initiative from Innovation Partnerships is supporting the CLOSUP team in its open source community-building efforts by encouraging municipal issuers and market participants to test the tool and provide feedback, and developers to contribute new features and customizations.
This webinar demonstrated the following steps for using this Excel-XBRL tool:
How to download and fill out the Excel template.
How to upload and convert the data.
How to access and use the XBRL output (HTML format). All conversions happen on the server, so users do not need any specialized knowledge beyond using simple Excel files (i.e. no macros).
The webinar also provided information for developers who may wish to access the source code to develop more capabilities or customized versions of the tool. Learn more about the tool at https://closup.umich.edu/acfr-tool and https://github.com/closup/process-xbrl.
