Dicover XBRL

U.S. SEC to make XBRL filings mandatory?

2008-06-05T11:14:00.000-07:00

The S.E.C., the American regulator body, is in the process of making the filing of financial reports completely XBRL based for large companies in the U.S.
Already now the SEC offers companies the opportunity to partake in a voluntary XBRL effort, for which they provide a GAAP accountancy based Taxonomy. Companies like Ford, General Electric, IBM, Pepsi, United Technologies are already filing their reports in the XBRL format, on a voluntary base.

Most likely, from December 2008 on, large corporations of over 5$ billion total float will be obliged to file their reports in the XBRL standard.

XBRL and Business Intelligence

2008-06-04T14:26:00.000-07:00

XBRL was set up as a way to make communication on financial data between organizations easier. However, it offers very valuable opportunites to improve standardization within organizations. This makes it a wonderful tool for Business Intelligence, because it can make the data quality within datawarehouses much better. XBRL can help in assuring that all divisions of a large company talk about the same concept when they report about 'profit' or 'turn-over'.

Who works with XBRL?

2008-06-04T14:19:00.000-07:00

Which companies already work with XBRL, and what are their expiriences?

What is XBRL

2008-06-04T14:13:00.000-07:00

XBRL stands for Extensible Business Reporting Language, a language based on XML that is used for communication between organizations about financial data. It enables its users to use standardized concepts of financial data, to avoid confusion about concepts and to make fast and exact data exchange possible. There are a number of good definitions available, some of which will be quoted here:

- "XBRL is a language for the electronic communication of business and financial data which is revolutionising business reporting around the world" -

XBRL International

- "XBRL is an open standard which supports information modeling and the expression of semantic meaning commonly required in business reporting" -

Wikipedia

- "The language for defining, producing, exchanging, and disseminating business reports" -

KPMG International

- "XBRL is a technology language for the electronic communication of business and financial data and is being implemented worldwide. XBRL-formatted documents enable greater efficiency, improved accuracy and reliability as well as cost savings to those involved in supplying and using financial and business information data" -

XBRL.us

That should give you a good first impression. Now let's dig a bit deeper

Discover XBRL Starts Here

2008-06-04T14:02:00.000-07:00

Discover XBRL is a blog that researches XBRL (Extensible Business Reporting Language). The entries in this blog will be a discovery into the exiting new possibilities offered by XBRL. We will start with looking into the basics of XBRL, also covering the closely connected fields of HTML, XML, SQL databases etc. Later, when this foundation is build, we will continue looking into the connection between XBRL and Business Intelligence, and what this Extensible language can do for Business Reporting.
Join us in this discovery into XBRL!