XBRL

And they have to repeat this process for every company they are reviewing or comparing. This is time-consuming and error-prone.

In principle, eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) is the answer. By labelling each line of data with a universally-understood XBRL ‘tag’ such as ‘net profit’, companies can enable investors and others – including regulators – to share data easily and import it into their spreadsheets from a variety of sources, without re-keying.

Some early adopters have confirmed that XBRL achieves time and cost savings in the reporting process, yet the take up has been slow. We believe that XBRL might be a partial solution for the future of reporting – but that a more fundamental debate is still needed. This should include what information is important, how it is created and used internally, and how it is shared with external audiences.

Without such a debate, the evolution of XBRL is likely to be shaped by regulators rather than users. We’d like to see more companies experimenting internally with the technology to explore what it has to offer and reach an informed view on whether it should be adopted more widely.

What investors want:

• Easier ways to import financial data into their own models without having to re-key numbers.
• Easy manipulation of data without having to re-key numbers.
• Compatible presentation of data so that they can bring in data sets for analysis across a range of companies or historical periods.
• Availability of taxonomies for more detailed, or industry-specific business and financial information.
• Financial statements that can be ‘automatically’ translated into a multitude of languages.

What we’ve done to make it work:

• Provided primary financial statements in a tagged XBRL format.
• Tagged each line so that data can be easily downloaded into an XBRL-enabled spreadsheet.
• Refrained from tagging the full financials – we think many companies will want to start by experimenting, as Generico has done.

See this in action

Intelligent Financial Statements™ kindly provided by CoreFiling Limited www.corefiling.com.