Skip to main contentEARLY IN HIS surety career, when 2025-2026 NASBP President Robert Coon worked as an underwriter, he sometimes had to spend long hours taking information from contractors’ Work-in-Progress (WIP) reports and keying them into a format that could be used by the surety’s software programs. "We had a very large multinational account, and it wouldn’t be unusual for them to have 500 or 600 jobs, so it would take two or three days to do it. About half the time was keying it in, and the other half was finding where I made mistakes. It was painfully tedious and time-consuming and really not a good use of time," said Coon, now Vice President of Surety Services for Scott Insurance in Greensboro, NC.
Many surety bond producers and surety companies are still using that manual method for inputting contractor clients’ WIP data into a digital format. In the not-toodistant future, however, that process could become the exception rather than the rule. For the past several years, NASBP has been working with partners in the technology and construction industries to develop a better approach, using XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) to standardize WIP reporting and to enable digital transmission of this information.
A Widely Accepted Standard The XBRL standard, introduced in 2003, enables companies, banks, government entities, and others to report their financial data in a structured way. "XBRL is a way of defining business information. It’s both a structure and a standard. It’s a way of taking data that might be in a PDF file or an Excel spreadsheet or a Word document, putting structure around it and making it digitally transportable," explains Michelle Savage, Vice President at XBRL US, which is the not-for-profit organization that supports the development of the free, open XBRL digital reporting standard.
XBRL can be adapted for any commercial or proprietary data systems, such as enterprise resource planning systems. The standard has gained widespread acceptance; for example, since 2009, it has been the format required by the Securities and Exchange Commission for public companies’ financial reports.
The second important aspect of XBRL is that data transmitted using the standard can be read by a machine without the need for human intervention. That’s what brought it to the attention of the NASBP Automation and Technology Committee a decade ago. "We got focused on financial analysis and data transmission and were looking for partners for tech solutions to help automate that. In that process, we came across XBRL," said Coon.
In 2016, XBRL US began working with key stakeholders in the surety industry, including NASBP and the Surety & Fidelity Association of America (through surety companies like Liberty Mutual, Zurich, and Travelers), to determine how XBRL could be used to streamline contractors’ financial reporting, specifically WIPs, to sureties.
"The sureties saw this as a way to improve the way they were processing information, which is expensive, and also give them more time to focus on conducting analyses of contractors’ financials so they could respond back to the contractors more quickly," said Savage. "They could also potentially review more data, so they could get more frequently reported WIPs and get a better picture of the financial health of that contractor."
Developing a Taxonomy
XBRL US already had a widely used established financial reporting taxonomy, the digital definitions for business concepts that make digital reporting possible. "So, we focused on the language and the terms for WIP, which is very specific to the construction industry," said Coon. The taxonomy represents all of the things normally found in a WIP, like contract number, cost to complete, the contract price, etc.
XBRL US led these efforts, which also included the Construction Financial Management Association (CFMA) and the Construction Progress Coalition (CPC), an organization that represents a broad coalition of architects, engineers, contractors, owners, and technology partners who work to advance digital transformation in the construction industry. "Our wheelhouse is trying to piece together a bunch of disparate organizations that have a common need for sharing data across the construction supply chain," said Nathan Wood, CPC Executive Director. Although they approach a construction project from different perspectives, these groups have similar pain points in the way that duplicate data entry, data loss, and bad data can impact their projects and their profitability.
Defining the WIP terms and developing the taxonomy was more work than originally expected, however, because various sections of the country had different names for this information. A WIP in one area might be called a backlog report, in another, a job schedule or billings report. So, the group had to select a common name that everyone could use. "Computers don’t work well with synonyms," Coon observed.
One of the first implementations of the newly completed WIP taxonomy came in 2019, when the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA), working with XBRL US, developed a way for surety bond agents to submit information in the XBRL format to the Surety Bond Guarantee Program (SBG).
"If you’re a bond agent and you’re working with a contractor that has an SBA program, you typically go to the SBA website and key in all the contractor’s WIP data once a year or whenever you have new data. It’s a very labor intensive process, and there could be rows and rows of WIP data that you have to type before submitting it," said Savage.
"So, we created a very, very basic tool that is an Excel spreadsheet. A bond agent can go into the spreadsheet and cut and paste the data for the report into that spreadsheet. They can then upload the spreadsheet to the XBRL website, which will transform it to XBRL. The agents can then send the WIP report directly to the SBA through the platform that we’ve created," she said. Agents can also save the spreadsheet so it can be easily updated as the contractor adds information.
"We do have a number of agents using this free tool that we created. We don’t really want to be in the business of creating software applications, but this is something that the SBA has been using for a few years now," Savage added.
Altova, a software development company, and Crowe LLP, a public accounting and consulting firm, have also developed tools that can convert spreadsheets and other formats of WIP reports into XBRL.
XBRL for Construction Software
While this SBA work was going on, XBRL US had also been partnering with Zurich, Travelers, and Merchants Bonding to ensure that sureties would be able to accept the WIP data in XBRL format. "Then we started contacting software companies that work with contractors to help them prepare their WIP reports and their financial statements. We wanted the software to be able to produce WIP data that would be structured in XBRL format when it reached the surety," said Savage.
It was also essential to get contractors’ input. In 2022, CFMA, CPC, and XBRL US jointly conducted a survey of CFMA’s contractor members to determine how they develop their WIP reports. They found that many contractors prepare their data in an Excel spreadsheet, which can be converted to the digital XBRL format. Others rely on software to prepare part of the WIP, then export it into Excel or print it out to do further work with it before sending it out as a PDF file.
The goal of XBRL US and its partners was to find a way to eliminate the extra steps in this process.
"The challenge was finding software tools that could generate the entire WIP within their application, because then we could work with those software companies to help them be able to convert the data to XBRL," said Savage. Sage, a construction management software provider, agreed to work with XBRL US; in 2024, the company announced it had completed a new WIP feature as part of its cloud-based Sage Intacct Construction software. The software is now able to produce a WIP report in fully machine readable, XBRL format.
"Sage is currently identifying contractors who are willing to be part of a pilot so that we can take their WIP and produce an XBRL-formatted report, have it go to the bond agent and then from the bond agent to the surety carrier, so that we can test the whole process," said Savage.
Another company, Plexxis Software Inc., began rolling out its new Plexxis Cloud platform in early August and will test its new financial forecasting platform sometime in 2026. "This platform has a game planning element to it that allows subcontractors to adjust their WIP as needed during their financial planning meetings. This is the tool that will have the export to surety function. For subcontractors, the game-planning portion was critical for the surety export to be effective," said Chad Pearson, a Senior Start Team Leader at Plexxis.
Encouraging Contractor Buy In
It’s easy to understand why sureties and surety bond producers are interested in receiving WIP reports in XBRL format. They enjoy an immediate benefit; there are fewer data errors, and staff members who aren’t tied up with manual data entry are freed up to perform other higher-value work.
But it is the contractors who will ultimately determine how quickly the XBRL standard will be adopted. "The problem is why should a contractor care to give their WIP, their financial data, to someone in a digital format, as opposed to what they’ve traditionally done in PDF or on paper? The incentives are clear for a surety and for surety bond producers, but it’s a little less clear for contractors," said Wood.
There are several benefits that contractors will enjoy with the adoption of the XBRL standard. The prerequisite of migrating their internal WIP reporting process from Excel to a cloud-based accounting software will itself save time and avoid errors. So, instead of simply looking at the ROI on adopting this kind of software, contractors should consider the RLP, or revenue loss potential, said Wood. "What is the potential revenue that you could be losing by not fixing this error in inefficiency?"
In addition, the CPC has been looking at other ways that sureties could reciprocate contractors that invest in XBRL submission. "One thread we’ve been pulling on recently is the topic of revenue recognition, specifically when does a change order become part of a WIP. That’s very much a gray area right now," said Wood. With the XBRL taxonomy, contractors might be able to better define the line between something being a revenue projection versus being an actual increase in the contract value.
Contractors could also gain an advantage because they’d be able to provide WIP information in a more timely manner. "Sureties can’t tell contractors, ‘if you get this information to us this way, your bond rates are going to drop.’ We can’t tie it to a cost," Coon added. But a contractor who realizes in the morning that the construction company needs a bid bond that afternoon would be able to transmit any updated WIP data immediately for the surety to use in deciding on the contractor’s bond request.
Although some contractors might be intimidated by the mention of XBRL and its taxonomy, Coon noted that this shouldn’t be a problem as Sage, Plexxis, and other vendors begin to incorporate XBRL into their software packages. There will be less emphasis on what is happening behind the scenes—XBRL as the backbone of these systems—and more emphasis on the capabilities the software changes will provide to users. "For example, contractors would be able to quickly and securely share an updated WIP report with their surety with the click of a button," said Wood.
It’s these software vendors that are now in the best position to encourage contractors to make the move to submitting WIPs in XBRL, said Coon. "It’s a value add to their service, an enhancement and improvement of their systems. They can tell contractors that this functionality will make contractors’ lives easier and more efficient."
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