Xbrl Assignment
Essay by Kill009 • October 9, 2011 • Essay • 729 Words (3 Pages) • 2,064 Views
XBRL assignment
XBRL
XBRL stands for eXtensible Business Reporting Language- a special programming language that facilitates communication of business information between business systems through computers and online through HTML pages. Users of XBRL easily find information that is highlighted , sorted and tagged quickly without manual input. It improves the reporting process by reducing time and the chances of data entry errors. By encoding information about data , other computers programs can read it, process it and check for accuracy.
Introduced in the 1990‟s by Charles Hoffman, eXtensible Business Reporting Language is revolutionizing business reporting across the globe (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XBRL). The Securities and Exchange Commission required the 500 largest U.S. public companies to use XBRL when submitting their filings starting June 2009. It is expected that by 2011 all public companies will use XBRL(www.xbrl.org). It is anticipated that the change will provide investors and other government agencies with increased data integrity and uniformity. The change may also allow for increased transparency of public owned companies' financial records for view by investors. XBRL allows labels in any language to be applied to items, as well as accounting references or other subsidiary information. XBRL can show how items are related to one another. It can thus represent how they are calculated (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XBRL). It can also identify whether they fall into particular groupings for organizational or presentational purposes. Most importantly, XBRL is easily extensible, so companies and other organizations can adapt it to meet a variety of special requirements.
The first taxonomy ever created using XBRL 1.0 was released July 31, 2000. It was the building block which helped improve the standard, build taxonomies and understand how to use it to get certain results. The creation of XBRL 2.0 in December 2003 corrected issues encountered with XBRL 1.0
The uses for XBRL are numerous. XBRL is currently being used in Asia, Europe and The Americas. While the U.S. and Asia focus on XBRL for use in capital markets, Europe has developed an eye-opening array of government applications that can share consistently structured XBRL data (www.xbrl.org).
The adoption of XBRL by business entities is becoming easier as more and more XBRL-aware software products are becoming available. These products can "support the exporting of data in XBRL form and will allow users to map charts of accounts and other structures to XBRL tags" (www.xbrl.org).
Those who stand to benefit from using XBRL include all who collect business data, including governments, regulators, economic agencies, stock exchanges, financial information companies and the like, and those who produce or use it, including accountants,
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