XBRL

The 21st Century Disclosure Initiative

The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has recently designated XBRL as the new standard for making financial reporting more ‘dynamic and organized’ around core company information.

This open standard, which defines the individual contents of financial reports and statements, makes it easier to access, publish and compare financial information. As a result, companies can guarantee transparent, effective financial communication throughout the organization as well as through the Internet.

XBRL is revolutionizing business reporting around the world. CFOs and CIOs, therefore, will need to assess how they can incorporate this new technology into their existing financial processes.

The technology
XBRL, which stands for ‘eXtensible Business Reporting Language’, belongs to a family of XML languages. It is currently being developed by an international, non-profit consortium of approximately 450 major companies, organizations and government agencies.

Prior to this initiative, companies generally published their financial information on a standard Internet page or in a printed document as a block of text. XBRL, however, provides an identification tag for each individual item, for example, ‘net profit’. As a result, any report that needs to show net profit only needs to reference this tag.

More importantly, XBRL ‘taxonomies’ or specifications can easily handle complex financial semantics such as assets, liabilities, income, expenses, debits and credits. These have been known to cause problems in reporting financial data with business intelligence (BI) reporting tools.

» Discover how Tagetik 3.0 supports companies with XBRL