xbrlkit

Work with XBRL filings above Arelle: fetch a filing, parse it once into a neutral typed model, and project that model into whichever portable representation you need — or hand it one of those representations and get the model back.

  EDGAR ───────────┐
  filings.xbrl.org ├──▶ Arelle ──▶ XbrlModel ──┬──▶ holon.jsonld    (RDF / JSON-LD)
  XBRL zip / iXBRL ┘                 ▲         ├──▶ TAVI            (compiled model)
                                     │         ├──▶ xBRL-JSON       (OIM)
                   holon, TAVI ──────┘         └──▶ property graph  (parquet, .lbug)

                   primary HTML ──▶ xbrlkit.text ──▶ sections (text blocks, Items, tables)

                   holon, TAVI ──▶ xbrlkit view ──▶ the report, rendered in a browser

                   any of the above ──▶ xbrlkit serve ──▶ MCP client (18 shaped tools)

Three ways in — the SEC, everyone else through filings.xbrl.org, and the filing itself: an XBRL package or archive (.zip), an iXBRL document (.htm), a bare instance (.xml), a filing directory, or an http(s) URL to any of them. Nothing about the middle of this requires EDGAR, or a regulator at all — a report that was never filed with anybody parses like one that was.

Four projections out, and two of those read back, so a report that was never an SEC filing gets the same treatment. A fifth surface, the filing's text, reads the primary HTML directly and needs neither Arelle nor the network. And xbrlkit view puts a filing on screen.

It is also a local MCP server. The package stands alone — a library and a CLI — but xbrlkit serve holds filings in memory and exposes them to Claude, ChatGPT or any MCP client through eighteen shaped tools, which makes reading a filing a conversation instead of a script: ask for a statement, the concepts behind a phrase, what foots to a subtotal, a segment breakdown, an exhibit, or a regex across the prose. Nothing is indexed and no database sits behind it — every answer is read from the filing in memory, on your machine. What you can ask it →

Arelle stays the parser — nobody should reimplement DTS resolution. What it does not give you is anything ergonomic to hold: ModelXbrl is a large mutable object graph tied to a controller you have to close. XbrlModel is the answer to that — stateless, single-filing, lossless, and the waist every projection hangs off.

The one architectural rule: everything goes through XbrlModel. A feature that reaches into Arelle's ModelXbrl directly is bypassing the waist, and that is the change that turns a kit into a junk drawer.

What's in the box

model.py is the waist itself, schema/ declares the property graph's tables, query.py runs SPARQL over a built holon, and view.py is the loopback server behind xbrlkit view and the view_filing tool.

Install

pip install xbrlkit

Exposes the xbrlkit CLI (build, fetch, query, cache, serve) and the library. Two optional extras: xbrlkit[lpg] for the property-graph projection (pyarrow, LadybugDB) and xbrlkit[mcp] for the MCP server.

From a source checkout:

brew install uv just
just install     # dependencies, and .env from the template

SEC User-Agent

SEC fair access asks for a User-Agent identifying you with contact info. EDGAR works out of the box under a default that names the project, and the first unattributed fetch says so once — SEC rate limits per IP, so the shared default costs nobody else their budget. Identifying yourself is a courtesy, and one worth extending. just install already created your .env:

# .env
SEC_GOV_USER_AGENT="Your Name your@email.com"

.env is loaded automatically by every command run from a checkout of this repo — the lookup is relative to the installed code, not your working directory, so a uvx or pip install never picks one up. There, use export SEC_GOV_USER_AGENT=…, --user-agent, or an MCP env block (see Serve to an MCP client). Nothing outside EDGAR needs it — a local file, a JSON report and filings.xbrl.org all load without.

Usage

# Build a holon.jsonld from a specific filing (-> ./output/)
xbrlkit build --cik 320193 --accno 0000320193-23-000106

# The other projections: TAVI (plus its .tavi.gaps.json sidecar), xBRL-JSON,
# the property graph (needs the lpg extra), or every one of them
xbrlkit build --cik 320193 --accno 0000320193-23-000106 --format tavi
xbrlkit build --cik 320193 --accno 0000320193-23-000106 --format all

# Fetch the latest filing for a ticker (-> ./output/); --form and --n filter
xbrlkit fetch --ticker NVDA

# Query consolidated facts in a built holon (in-memory SPARQL)
xbrlkit query --in output/0000320193-23-000106.holon.jsonld --element us-gaap:Assets

# Open a filing as a rendered report in the browser — no account, no download
xbrlkit view NVDA

# The filing itself needs no EDGAR and no network — an XBRL .zip, an iXBRL
# .htm, a bare instance .xml, a filing directory. `serve` and `view` take any
# source; `build` and `fetch` are the EDGAR path
xbrlkit view ./report.zip
xbrlkit serve ./mmm-20241231.htm

From a source checkout, just wraps the same CLI: just build 320193 0000320193-23-000106 and just fetch NVDA.

from xbrlkit.parse import load_model, to_xbrl_model
from xbrlkit.serialize import to_holon, to_tavi_report
from xbrlkit.deserialize import from_holon_json

model = to_xbrl_model(load_model("mmm-20241231.htm"), filing_meta)
holon = to_holon(model)
tavi, gaps = to_tavi_report(model)
model = from_holon_json(holon)  # and back again

Serve to an MCP client

Two ways to run it. They differ in which process does the fetching, and so in where your SEC identity goes.

stdio — the client launches the server. The identity belongs in the server's own env block:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "xbrlkit": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": [
        "--from", "xbrlkit[mcp]@latest",
        "xbrlkit", "serve", "--transport", "stdio"
      ],
      "env": { "SEC_GOV_USER_AGENT": "Your Name you@example.com" }
    }
  }
}

HTTP — you start the server, the client only points at a URL. An env block in the client config would reach nothing here; set it on the command:

pip install "xbrlkit[mcp]"
SEC_GOV_USER_AGENT="Your Name you@example.com" xbrlkit serve
# → MCP at http://127.0.0.1:8765/mcp

# or without installing anything
SEC_GOV_USER_AGENT="Your Name you@example.com" \
  uvx --from "xbrlkit[mcp]@latest" xbrlkit serve

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "xbrlkit": { "type": "http", "url": "http://127.0.0.1:8765/mcp" }
  }
}

or, equivalently:

claude mcp add --transport http xbrlkit http://127.0.0.1:8765/mcp

A .env file is not a channel for either of these. The lookup is relative to the installed code rather than your working directory, so it resolves only inside a checkout of this repo — a uvx or pip install never sees one. Use the environment, the env block, or --user-agent.

Both are optional: EDGAR works unattributed under the default, saying so once. And filings.xbrl.org, local packages and TAVI/holon JSON need no identity at all.

What you can ask it

Load a filing from the chat — a ticker, an EDGAR cik:accession, a lei: for ESEF and the national regimes, a local package, or a holon or TAVI by path or URL. A ticker or cik:accession loads the filing's published holon first when the RoboSystems CDN has one, falling back to EDGAR. Then: