What's XBRL reporting got do with got to do with bar godes?

• Author: Howell, Joseph
• Position: XBRL - EXtensible Business Reporting Language

Those who remember life before the bar code will recall that a grocery store cash register receipt used to show a price and little, if any, other information about the items purchased. As such, a grocer couldn't tell what was purchased until he or she counted what was left on the shelf. Even then, it couldn't be exactly determined whether missing items were sold or stolen.

Looking back over the years, it's easy to see that bar code technology has had a profound and positive impact on efficiency in the grocery business, and many other businesses as well. Today, most industries, including manufacturing and distribution, could not function without this technology that is now taken for granted.

For those early adopters that experienced the early days of the bar code, it was not immediately obvious that business or consumers would ever reap any benefits from the technology. It took a very long time to build a critical mass of bar-coded merchandise, to the point where the entire process--manufacturing through consumption--could be positively impacted. Until that time, the early scanners were expensive, especially for grocery and other retail businesses that operated on thin margins. The cost of implementation was difficult to justify.

Early adopters also faced a steep learning curve, resulting in frequent, frustrating mistakes. There was that time when the price on the receipt frequently bore little resemblance to the price shown on the shelf, and customers also complained that it often took longer to check out of the store using bar code scanners rather than old-fashioned, manual cash registers.

Behind the scenes, companies struggled, because many of the tools available to work with the new bar code technology were primitive. Accountants who previously craved useful data were swimming in the stuff, and they struggled to get the information into forms that could be easily analyzed and understood.

Several factors contributed to overcoming the early growing pains of bar codes and allowed taking full advantage of the benefits of the technology.

It began with accumulating a critical mass of bar-coded products and gaining experience using the bar codes. The tools also matured and became more sophisticated and useful.

Finally, bar codes be-came fully integrated throughout all the relevant processes--production, distribution, point of sale and back-end analysis.

XBRL/Bar Codes--Similarities and Differences

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission...