In the words of Graham Tilbury, business development manager at Thomson Reuters, “XBRL has been a solution looking for a problem for much of its life”.

XBRL (Extensible Business Reporting Language) has existed for over a decade since Charlie Hoffman, an accountant in Tacoma in the US, had his eureka moment. He realised as he looked at a simple text format being used in electronic publishing that the same type of system could be developed for financial reporting. The result was XBRL.

It was expected to become a boon to users of accounts, as they, in theory, would be able to analyse a company or a sector’s figures any way they wanted once they had all been electronically tagged. “The concept is brilliant,” says Ronan Langford, an XBRL expert at Deloitte.

But brilliance was not enough. XBRL did not take off. A survey among the world’s analysts carried out by the CFA Institute last year found that 55 per cent of their members were still not aware of XBRL.

But success eventually came from an unexpected quarter. Regulators around the world suddenly woke up to the possibilities. In particular, the SEC (the US regulator), and HMRC (the UK tax authority), realised that they could reduce their costs significantly if companies had to file their financial statements or tax returns in XBRL format.

XBRL assumptions have been turned upside down. “The regulators have been the innovators, both in the UK and the US,” says Richard Anning, head of the IT faculty at the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales.

“We expected it to be investors who drove XBRL, but now it is the regulators.”

XBRL was expected to be a boon to business. Instead, it has come to be seen as  a chore.

“Clients see it as a compliance burden coming at the wrong time in the economic cycle,” says Sean Callaghan, leader for XBRL in the UK for accountants Ernst & Young.

In the UK, all corporation tax returns with the relevant accounts and computations will have to be filed online in a version of XBRL called iXBRL from 1 April 2011 for periods ending on or after 1 April 2010.

Companies have some grace if they can enter their accounts early, ahead of the 2011 deadline. But that is as far as it goes. “We are going to have a rough couple of years,” says Mr Tilbury.

“There is a complete lack of awareness,” says Ken Williamson, head of financial accounting advisory services for Ernst & Young. “Every set of statutory accounts in the UK need to be done under XBRL and that has gone completely under the radar.”

But it is not all gloom. David Forbes, managing director of Forbes Computer Systems, a software provider, was the first person in the UK to file. And, he says, it has worked: “It is not an issue at all, if you use accounts production software and it is XBRL-enabled. It is a question of ticking the box marked ‘send in XBRL’.”

How this will influence  the expansion of XBRL is not clear.

In the US, where big companies will all be using it for their filings with the SEC within the next few years, it could act as a trigger that would be of benefit to investors. In the UK, the regulatory focus is likely to increase. Once the system has bedded down, HMRC is expected to use it for compliance and investigatory work.

“It could run a query to look for a particular red flag which would give the chance to challenge the accounts,” says Mr Williamson.

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