What's in it for me? XBRL revolutionizing business reporting.

• Author: Roberts, Daniel
• Position: XBRL Technology

XBRL is the revolutionary information standard that enables the electronic tagging of business reports, including financial statements. XBRL allows for greater transparency and ease of use of the information contained within financial reports.

The standard also allows companies to produce just one financial statement, rather than several, for multiple users--which can include internal users, auditors, banks, analysts and investment markets.

Though each user may seek different information from a financial statement to use for a unique purpose, all users can access the information from a single XBRL-development document.

The XBRL standard is catching on not only with public companies, but regulatory agencies and banks also are producing XBRL documents. For example:

* The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Office of Thrift Supervision, among other regulatory agencies, are involved in a joint project that will have all U.S. banks submit their quarterly "Call Reports" in XBRL to regulators starting later this year.

* Several public companies, including Microsoft and Morgan Stanley, have filed XBRL versions of their financial statements with the SEC and posted them on their websites.

* Several national banks are involved in a market demonstration project to assess the benefits and obstacles of having borrowers submit their financial statements in XBRL to lenders.

As XBRL spreads, Nasdaq has even provided a demonstration on its website, www.nasdaq.com/xbrl?, to highlight the inherent analytic capabilities related to XBRL formatted data for companies and their stakeholders.

Implementing XBRL and creating XBRL-tagged financial statements will require additional work by CFOs and finance department personnel to get the system up and running and get preparers trained on XBRL. This will require businesses to invest time and money, which begs the question: "What's in it for me?"

BENEFITS

After the initial investment of time and effort, and in some cases upgrading accounting software packages, XBRL will deliver various benefits.

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Internal Financial

Reporting Improvements

Companies using XBRL can facilitate communication and common financial reporting, improving the quality, accuracy, timeliness and validity of financial information prepared, and used internally, especially when various departments and divisions within a company are using different financial management...