XBRL - Extensible Business Reporting Language

Getting the right information to the right people at the right time—faster, more accurately, and with greater efficiency—is vital in today’s business world. Which is why investors and analysts alike favour XBRL (Extensible Business Reporting Language). They like XBRL because it can significantly enhance companies’ external reporting capabilities. With XBRL, investors and analysts can quickly and easily access relevant corporate reporting data, extract it into analytical software programs, and compare it with other companies’. But as important as XBRL is to external reporting, it also has an important role to play in building more efficient systems inside your company. In fact, virtually any internal process that involves collecting, preparing, or analyzing significant volumes of financial information—whether for management reporting, credit assessment, or tax provisioning, for example—can be improved using XBRL. How? Because XBRL-formatted data, once entered into a computer, never needs to be re-keyed into another system. That means you can move data easily back and forth across various computing platforms and software programs. And, because XBRL is “extensible” to virtually any kind of business information, many new kinds of non-financial and industry-specific data can also be captured and disseminated throughout the enterprise. And since XBRL is fully compatible with the way the internet works, the possibilities for online distribution is limited only by your imagination.

If this is your situation:

• You want reduce analysis and financial information reporting costs and improving internal efficiency via a “create one, publish many” approach.
• You want to increase the speed of financial data preparation, and the efficiency of business decisions.
• You want to enhance the transparency of the distribution and usability of existing financial statement information whilst company management can still control disclosure and data until it reaches the investor's computers
• You want to communicate with investors more efficiently, whilst at the same time reducing external reliance on secondary (and perhaps unreliable) sources.
• You want others—such as banks, analysts, accountants and credit analysts, for example—to be able to re-use your corporate data quickly and easily.