“Data is the heart of any business. Without good data turned into information, management can’t make the proper decisions.”—Neal J. Hannon, “Making Data the Center of Your Information System,” Strategic Finance.

XBRL is a language for the electronic munication of business and financial data which is revolutionizing business reporting around the world. XBRL stands for eXtensible Business Reporting Language. It is one of a family of “XML” languages which is being a standard means of municating information between businesses and on the Inter

XBRL has been developed by XBRL International Inc., an international nonprofit nsortium of approximately 600 major panies, anizations and ernment agencies representing around 26 jurisdictions. This llaborative effort began in 1998 and has produced a variety of specifications and taxonomies to support the goal of providing a standard, XML-based language for digitizing business reports in acrdance with the rules of acunting in each untry or with other reporting regimes such as banking regulation or performance benchmarking. It is an open standard, free of licence fees.  It is already being put to practical use in a number of untries and implementations of XBRL are growing rapidly around the world.

The idea behind XBRL is simple.  Instead of treating financial information as a block of text—as in a standard Inter page or a printed document—it provides an identifying tag for each individual item of data. This is puter readable. For example, pany profit has its own unique tag.

The introduction of XBRL tags enables automated processing of business information by puter software, cutting out laborious and stly processes of manual reentry and parison. puters can treat XBRL data “intelligently”: they can regnize the information in the XBRL document, select it, analyze it, store it, exchange it with other puters and present it automatically in a variety of ways for users. XBRL greatly increases the speed of handling financial data, rces the chance of error and permits automatic checking of information.

panies can use XBRL to save sts and streamline their processes for llecting and reporting financial information. nsumers of financial data, including investors, analysts, financial institutions and regulators, can receive, find, pare and analyze data much more rapidly and efficiently if it is in XBRL format.

XBRL can handle data in different languages and acunting standards. It can flexibly be adapted to meet different requirements and uses. Data can be transformed into XBRL by suitable mapping tools or it can be generated in XBRL by appropriate software.

It provides major benefits in the preparation, analysis and munication of business information. It offers st savings, greater efficiency and improved auracy and reliability to all those involved in supplying or using financial data.

The taxonomies of US GAAP and IFRS are in place. Thus, XBRL adoption lends itself to the widely used standards of business reporting in the world.