An illustrative example to understand XBRL

ABC Limited is required to file the following returns:

§         Annual Financial Statements

§         Tax Returns

§         Returns to the Registrar of Companies

All these returns have some elements which are common example Sales, Administrative expenses etc. If these elements could be tagged and kept in a database, a mere re-arrangement of such elements could facilitate generation of different reports on a concurrent basis. XBRL facilitates financial data elements to be stored in a database and data from live financial statements can be linked to those elements to obtain an XBRL compliant instance document. This document can also be easily queried, retrieved sorted for financial analysis and research.