XBRL: Make Its Power Your Own.

• Author: GRAY, GLEN L.

XBRL. It's more than just another professional acronym. XBRL (extensible business reporting language) represents new specifications for electronic business reporting that will revolutionize the way financial information is reported. XBRL will enhance financial statement accessibility and usability while offering substantial practice opportunities to CPAs.

XBRL BENEFITS

When users (management, stockholders, creditors, financial analysts, taxing authorities and others) want to analyze financial reports they have three primary tasks to perform. First is the mechanical task of loading the report into the users' analytical software such as a spreadsheet. The second task is to use the software to aggregate, disaggregate, clean and re-categorize the original data so it is comparable with other data already in the users' databases. Finally, the users actually analyze the data and make decisions such as to buy or sell stock. Users usually only have a limited amount of time to complete these tasks and if the report source is a printed document, most of the users' time will be spent on mechanical tasks.

XBRL enables users to access financial reports in a matter of seconds and move the data to the users' analytical software with literally "a click of a mouse." This gives the users more time to focus on making decisions, which could decrease credit costs and increase analysts' coverage of smaller public companies because of the lower costs of analysis.

BACKGROUND

On any Web page, you can view the source code by selecting "source" (Internet Explorer) or "page source" (Netscape) from the "view" menu in your browser. The information you see between the brackets ([less than] [greater than]) is HTML (hypertext markup language), a standardized language that allows all browsers to view content in essentially the same way. Each tag tells the browser how to format the content of the page. HTML doesn't identify or describe the content between the tags. As such, HTML does nothing to help automated searches for specific items from Web-based documents, including financial statements, press releases and other forms of business reports.

XML (extensible markup language) on the other hand, allows developers to create new tags that can be "read" by XML-aware browsers and search engines. XML is used to identify or describe content. For example, the source code of a Web page using XML, might include a sentence that looks like this:

Our income for 1999 was [less...