eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL)

Introduction

XBRL is a language for the electronic communication of business and financial data which is revolutionising business reporting around the world.  The word XBRL is short form of eXtensible Business Reporting Language.  It provides major benefits in the preparation, analysis and communication of business information.  It offers cost savings, greater efficiency and improved accuracy and reliability to all those involved in supplying or using financial data.  It is an open standard, free of licence fees, being developed by a non-profit making international consortium. XBRL International is a not-for-profit consortium of approximately 650 companies and agencies worldwide working together to build the XBRL language and promote and support its adoption.

This collaborative 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 accordance with the  rules of accounting in each country or with other reporting regimes such as banking regulation or performance benchmarking.

All of us know that HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) is a standard way of marking up a document so it can be published on the World Wide Web and viewed in a browser.  It provides a set of pre-defined tags describe on how content appears in a browser.  For example, it describes the font and color of text.  It gives little information on meaning or context. XML (Extensible Markup Language) uses tags to identify the meaning, context and structure of data.  XML is a standard language which is maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).  XML does not replace HTML; it is a complementary format that is platform independent, allowing XML data to be rendered on any device such as a computer, cell phone, PDA or tablet device.  It enables rich, structured data to be delivered in a standard, consistent way.  Whereas HTML offers a fixed, pre-defined number of tags, XML neither defines nor limits tags.  Instead, XML provides a framework for defining tags (i.e. taxonomy) and the relationship between them (i.e. schema). Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a universally preferred data description language used to describe the data we store, manipulate, and exchange via the web. The basis for this technology is a "tagging" process by which each value, item, and descriptor, etc. in the exchanged information can be given a unique set of tags with which to describe it. Using these tags, computer programs can read the data without human intervention. In short, XML is a language designed to develop other languages, such as XBRL.

Thus XBRL is an XML-based schema that focuses specifically on the requirements of business reporting.  XBRL builds upon XML, allowing accountants and regulatory bodies to identify items that are unique to the business reporting environment.  The XBRL schema defines how to create XBRL documents and XBRL taxonomies, providing users with a set of business information tags that allows users to identify business information in a consistent way.  XBRL is also extensible in that users are able to create their own XBRL taxonomies that define and describe tags unique to a given environment.