Looking past the pliance exercise, some leading panies are starting to take note of the effectiveness, efficiency, and reliability of management reporting that is inherent in XBRL. The International Federation of Aountants and ISACA have teamed up to produce a paper, Leveraging XBRL for Value in anizations that is loaded with ideas on how to leverage XBRL, not just live with it.

The paper points out how panies can align the internal measurement and munication of key performance metrics with the external pliance requirements by embedding XBRL into their internal processes. When using the same technology to generate and transmit information inside the anization as they already use to ply with external reporting requirements, they rce overall sts. And when they use the same definitions for important metrics both internally and externally, they minimize risk and better align internal and external munications.

ISACA and IFAC develop the paper to provide aounting and assurance professionals with guidance they can rely on to leverage value from XBRL initiatives and pliance requirements, said Roger Debreceny, a member of ISACA and -developer of the XBRL paper. “Understanding how to embed XBRL within an anization’s information processes can enhance management munication, increasing the value of the information used within an enterprise,” he said.

Roger Tabor, chair of IFAC’s Professional Aountants in Business mittee, said the paper serves as a starting point to integrate XBRL into a pany’s information management processes. “Many anizations have not yet realized how useful XBRL can be for them,” he said.

XBRL is growing as a mandatory reporting method in untries around the world for a variety of purposes. In addition to the financial reporting requirement to various securities regulators, it is used for sharing data among regulatory services, for various types of reporting to ernment agencies and banks, for statistical reporting, for submitting credit risk reports to mercial banks, and for rporate tax reporting. Inside some rporate anizations, XBRL is being the basis for some internal management reporting, statistical reporting, internal audit and other internal ntrol functions, and it’s being used to integrate dispersed reporting and aounting systems.

IFAC and ISACA point out that the extensibility and flexibility that are inherent to XBRL make it adaptable to a wide variety of different uses and requirements. panies can automate data llection in ways never before imaginable. As an example, data from different pany divisions with different aounting systems can be assembled quickly, inexpensively, and efficiently if the sources of data all originate through XBRL. Once it is gathered there, it can be sliced and diced into any number of reports with a minimum of effort, using various subsets of the data.

And the paper shares an important reminder about the auracy that es from such automation. Once the data enters the XBRL system, it can be sorted and sifted in innumerable ways with no re-keying of information, which can naturally lead to errors and misinterpretations, which ultimately increases sts.