Even before all public panies are required to report in XBRL and well before investors have begun making meaningful use of it, the critical benefits of adopting XBRL and putting it to work in analyzing rporate data are ing to light.

Although only about 1,500 panies have reported their financial results in XBRL so far, Michelle Savage, vice president at XBRL US, demonstrates how it might have provided useful insight into systemic risk before the enomic crisis. She provides some great examples of how XBRL might have been handy in heading off the credit crisis before it became a global enomic tailspin.

Strolling through 2010 third-quarter data, for example, Savage disvered that the financial sector, which includes insurance and real estate, holds 65 percent of total assets but only 14 percent of revenues among panies reporting in XBRL. Fannie Mae alone held 9.5 percent of total assets.

Here’s more: In the retail sector, WalMart’s revenue represents 29 percent of the total retail trade reported revenue of $1.4 trillion. panies in the petroleum refining sector make up less than 1 percent of the panies that have reported through XBRL to date, but their revenue in the third quarter of 2010 was almost 10 percent of total revenue reported.

That’s the kind of information that uld be invaluable to investors as they learn to use XBRL to gather and sort information. But even further, that has big implications for regulators looking for stress fractures in the enomic system. “With this kind of information available on a real-time basis, identifying investment opportunities and flagging problem panies can be as simple as a few keystrokes,” Savage says. We can expect the new regulatory initiatives taking shape as a result of the Dodd-Frank Act to make significant use of XBRL to look for signs of trouble.

The data will get deeper and more meaningful when thousands more panies begin reporting in XBRL in 2011 as required by the Securities and Exchange mission. There still are plenty of questions in the marketplace about whether XBRL is really worth the time and expense, but XBRL really is the modern variation of EDGAR. When EDGAR emerged in the late 1980s, folks then had a hard time imagining how the electronic submission and storage of financial data would change the way the market aesses information. “Today, however, uld any of the investors, analysts, librarians, academics or reporters who actively use it imagine a world without EDGAR?” Savage wonders.

XBRL US has created a simple application to demonstrate the power of XBRL, allowing users to extract revenue and asset information for all panies currently filing in XBRL. The application demonstrates how XBRL makes information and analysis so fast and aessible. Savage says it not only opens up a wealth of information, but it promises to level the playing field between large and small panies when all panies are reporting under XBRL.