Businesses are always bombarded with requests to provide more detailed, more rigorously defined and a wider variety of information - yet most businesses are not equipped to deliver it. The pressure on businesses and regulatory agencies to capture, exchange, and analyze data is also growing rapidly.
For businesses to comply with these regulatory requests, they must collect and monitor more detailed information and report them on a more frequent basis. Governments and regulators requesting this information must also implement sophisticated systems to capture, process and analyze massive amounts of information from thousands (in some jurisdictions millions) of filers. This information must be accurate, complete and consistent - allowing regulatory organizations to quickly assess, consolidate, analyze and act on these monthly, quarterly or annual filings.
A financial data exchange standard was needed to ensure that information is being consistently reported across organizations and to the satisfaction of a variety of regulatory bodies. Enter XBRL: established in 1999, XBRL (short for “eXtensible Business Reporting Language”) is an open source XML based language developed to define and exchange business and financial information. XBRL is used to describe the data elements and the business rules inherent in this business information. Like a barcode, it links fact values to a wealth of metadata that govern the interpretation and validation of these facts. XBRL promises to help achieve corporate and regulators’ goals for quick and automated analysis of larger amounts of information - thus reducing time, costs, and errors involved in business reporting processes.
XBRL provides for the structured exchange and validation of business reporting information. It also ensures context and integrity of the data’s meaning across multiple processing and reporting environments. With XBRL, businesses and agencies can attain higher levels of data accuracy and information reuse, which results in faster turnaround times and decision making.
