Doctor Liu Shiping, known as “Golden Finger” in the financial circle of China, is currently acting as Chairman of the board of directors of Global Business Intelligence nsulting ., Ltd. (GBI), Professor of the Institute of Software of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Chief Scientist and Associate Director of the Research Center of Finance Sciences and Technology of Graduate University of the CAS, Vice Chairman of the Executive mmittee of XBRL China as well as Associate Director of Business Intelligence Professional mmittee of the China Federation of IT Promotion (CFIP).

Q: What is XBRL?

A: XBRL refers to the application of XML (eXtensible Markup Language) in financial and business reports. It is a method of standardized definition and expression of business data, which provides a set of standardized tags for marking various data elements in electronic business documentation, in order to make different puter systems able to automatically process and pare such business information in a nsistent way. XBRL avoids not only the process of the traditional laborious data entry and fussy parison but also the difficulty in retrieving business data from heterogeneous data sources, thus greatly improving the efficiency in data processing and rcing the possibility of data rruption.

Q: What prompted XBRL?

A: With the development of the global enomy, managerial personnel need to process various financial statements. Due to different formats of these statements, they have to input replicate data into different statements in different formats. With the increase in the number of statements, the workload for the managerial personnel has turned out to be much heavier, which forces them to spend nearly all of their time on data llection and statement preparation, leaving little time for data analysis. And this is how XBRL has e into being.

Q: What benefits can XBRL bring to us?

A: XBRL, an interactive language of electronic data applied in the business and financial industries, has brought about a revolution in the worldwide business reports. The financial nditions of an enterprise can be nveniently and rapidly aessed by XBRL documentation. Financial statements may be used cross enterprises, industries, untries and languages after the worldwide adoption of the puter-readable XBRL technology.

Q: What problems XBRL is expected to solve?

A: As we know, the advent of XBRL is to address some problems in the current traditional financial reports, such as the plicatedness and inefficiency in statement formulation, the singularity in report mode, the innsistency in statement formats and the inability in keeping pace with the development of the global acunting system.

Q: Why is XBRL said to be able to serve as an electronic instrument for information disclosure and regulation?

A: Data repetition and innsistency can be rced to the minimum by the application of XBRL as a standard for information data. The banking financial institution retrieves data from multiple information sources and, in the meantime, provides information for several regulatory and management institutions. At present, the regulatory authority has not pletely standardized its requirements on the reported data as submitted by financial institutions such as banks, leading to varied interpretations by different banks over some data items as well as to frequent data filing repetition and innsistency. The banks and the regulatory authorities, by adopting XBRL, can share the unified definition of a data item via XBRL taxonomy. Thus, the regulator and the regulatees can reach a nsensus on the semantics and rrelations of different data items in business reports. nsequently, the information disclosure by financial institutions such as banks can be better regulated, the efficiency in information disclosure improved, and in-depth analysis of the disclosed information by the market facilitated. All these help China’s banking supervision to gradually meet the requirements of Basel II.

Q: What’s the impact of XBRL on acunting harmonization?

A: With the aeleration of enomic globalization, the ntradiction between the nationalization and internationalization of acunting has bee more and more intense. Thanks to the global popularization of XBRL, munication among enterprises and their business modes are likely to be transformed. Moreover, the ntradiction between the nationalization and internationalization of acunting will be radically eased.

XBRL is a revolutionary progress in the development of the worldwide business reports, greatly ntributing to the llection, preparation, analysis and exchange of business reports. Presently, many anizations and institutions are offering help in this regard. China has begun the relevant researches and application, and, in some aspects, has reached the world’s advanced level. Noheless, there is still much potential left untapped for the XBRL popularization.

Q: Why does XBRL mean a golden business opportunity for the software industry?

A: The industrial application of XBRL requires both an appropriate taxonomy and supportive software. With XBRL, financial statements can be read and analyzed by software. This means not only a revolution in financial statements but an opportunity for software development as well.

Q: Domestically, XBRL is still at its infancy stage. What’s the general attitude of software enterprises toward this emerging technology?

A: At present, domestic industries are yet to know more about the benefits of XBRL. At present, financial statements are processed with numerous tools. Enterprises all realize that financial statements are in need of a reform, but such a reform involves significant st. No enterprise is willing to spend much on some technology with unforeseeable benefits.

GBI together with other software enterprises has recently launched its research and application projects on XBRL. We are nfident that with the increasing knowledge of the benefits of XBRL and by the application of supportive software, enterprises will eventually see its impressive advantage.