XBRL

The acronym XBRL stands for the eXtensible Business Reporting Language.

XBRL is a rapidly emerging XML-based standard to define and exchange business and financial performance information. The standard is governed by a not-for-profit international consortium (XBRL International Incorporated) of more than 300 organisations, including regulators, government agencies, infomediaries and software vendors. XBRL International is supported by it's jurisdictions – independent bodies, generally organised on a country-specific basis, that work to promote the adoption of XBRL and the development of taxonomies that define the information exchange requirements of their particular domains. XBRL is being rapidly adopted to replace both paper-based and legacy electronic financial data collection by a wide range of regulators. It is now starting to be used for the disclosure of financial performance information by companies, notably in the SEC's voluntary filing program.

XBRL is a standards based way to communicate business and financial performance data. These communications are defined by metadata set out in taxonomies. Taxonomies capture the definition of individual reporting elements as well as the relationships between elements within a taxonomy and in other taxonomies. They provide an extremely powerful way to model the semantics of a reporting framework and are highly extensible. While taxonomies can be created by anyone, to date, the largest ones have been created via collaboration amongst accountants seeking to capture generally accepted accounting principles that apply in various jurisdictions. Organisations that seek to communicate data to third parties produce data, or "instance" documents that conform to these taxonomies.

The way that taxonomies themselves are constrained is governed by a formal Specification that the XBRL International consortium publishes.

XBRL is somewhat different to many other XML standards published by consortia. Generally, when two parties wish to exchange information using XML, they need to have prior access to all of the element definitions. But accounting involves the dissemination of information, the vast majority of which conforms to reporting norms, but some of which is unique to the circumstances of a particular company.

What to do? XBRL allows the creation of taxonomies that capture the semantics of a reporting framework like US GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) or the IFRS (International Financial Reporting Standards) by way of consortium collaboration. These taxonomies get created through a process not unlike the collaboration that goes into an XML schema development.

However, and importantly, these taxonomies (which are generally reviewed for conformance to best practice by the XBRL International consortium) can be extended by individual companies. For example, ACME Corporation can disclose the 98% of its financial statements that are plain US GAAP by using the concepts, (and therefore labels, authoritative references, calculation and presentation framework) in the approved US GAAP taxonomy. But the 2% of the disclosures in the ACME financial statements that are unique to that company — eg: the value of the corporation's patented RoadRunner Elimination products — can be defined using an extension taxonomy, and data that conforms to those definitions can be disseminated with the rest of the US GAAP items.

In other words, it's necessary for applications that consume XBRL data to be able to ALSO consume (generally for human analysis) definitions that the applications are entirely unfamiliar with. That makes the X in XBRL critical. But it also makes it possible to accurately model something as complex as accounting.

So from the forgoing, it should be clear that XBRL differs from most XML based standards in that XBRL documents (instances) require specific parsers to validate full compliance of instance with its corresponding taxonomy.

Historical US company SEC filings information can be downloaded from Edgar Online. News distribution companies such as PR Newswire and Business Wire provide services to listed companies to allow them to distribute their financial information in XBRL format.

External links

The official XBRL web site is www.xbrl.org

On top of this there are several jurisdictional websites;

Categories: TLAs | XML standards | Accounting