Benefits to a company from putting its financial statements into XBRL

XBRL increases the usability of financial statement information.  The need to re-key financial data for analytical and other purposes can be eliminated.  By presenting its statements in XBRL, a company can benefit investors and raise its profile.  It will also meet the requirements of regulators, lenders and others consumers of financial information, who are increasingly demanding reporting in XBRL.  This will improve business relations and lead to a range of benefits. With full adoption of XBRL, companies can automate data collection. For example, data from different company divisions with different accounting systems can be assembled quickly, cheaply and efficiently.  Once data is gathered in XBRL, different types of reports using varying subsets of the data can be produced with minimum effort.  A company finance division, for example, could quickly and reliably generate internal management reports, financial statements for publication, tax and other regulatory filings, as well as credit reports for lenders.  Not only can data handling be automated, removing time-consuming, error-prone processes, but the data can be checked by software for accuracy.

XBRL facilitates the communication of entire reports, avoiding 'template reporting', which can be misleading and inaccurate. Where aspects of a particular business demand unique tags, report owners can create them, communicating the definition of a concept as well as its relationship to other parts of a report. In other words, there is no need to force a reporting concept into an ill-fitting box. XBRL is not a standard chart of accounts. It allows the standardization of common business reporting concepts while providing flexibility to extend the vocabulary to meet individual circumstances.

Because XBRL is based on core internet technologies, it is possible to search across XBRL documents and extract individual concepts that might be needed for particular types of analysis. It is also possible to transform XBRL reports into any other format, including those more commonly used such as HTML and PDF.