Potential uses of XBRL

XBRL can be applied to a very wide range of business and financial data.  Among other things, it can handle:

• Company internal and external financial reporting.
• Business reporting to all types of regulators, including tax and financial authorities, central banks and goverments.
• Filing of loan reports and applications;  credit risk assessments.
• Exchange of information between government departments or between other institutions, such as central banks.
• Authorative accounting literature - providing a standard way of describing accounting documents provided by authoritative bodies.
• A wide range of other financial and statistical data which needs to be stored, exchanged and analysed.

 Database  used with XBRL

XBRL is a format for exchanging information between applications.  Therefore each application will store data in whatever form is most effective for its own requirements and import and export information in XBRL format so that it can be readily imported or exported in turn by other applications.  In some applications, for example, the XBRL formatted information being used may be mostly tabular numeric information, hence easily manipulated in a relational database.  In other applications, the XBRL information may consist of narrative document-like structures with a lot of text, so that a native XML database may be more appropriate.  There is no mandatory relationship between XBRL and any particular database or other processing or storage architecture.