Outsource XBRL Reporting - eXtensible Business Reporting Language

Consumers, investors and the government are increasing pressure on businesses to expose more of their transactional data for greater accountability. Along with exposing the right amount of data stakeholders also want real-time and accurate information for their decision making. Inspite of organizations having invested heavily on financial systems for business insights the inability of these systems to communicate with each other is a handicap for efficient, error free and timely response to reporting needs.

As if the accounting and financial reporting landscape was not already crowded with standardization efforts, here comes a new reporting language, XBRL.

• The world is moving to XBRL. Be an early mover
• XBRL programming language allows quick and efficient data collection, analysis and creating trends to help business decisions
• Allows machines to retrieve data in any format required
• Allows machines to retrieve data in any format required
• Financial information can be used across different reports with accuracy and integrity

You must be thinking, how will things change with XBRL?

XBRL is revolutionizing the way data is managed in the accounting and financial reporting world. It has given a completely new dimension to storing, retrieving and reporting financial data.

What is XBRL?

XBRL, expanded as eXtensible Business Reporting Language is a language for communicating business and accounting data. It is built on XML, with an open license, free to use and developed by an association of Organizations, Governments and non profit agencies. XBRL is a language for communicating financial data efficiently and it is radically changing the business reporting standards.

Is it a new standard?

XBRL is not about introducing a new standard but enhancing the effectiveness of existing accounting information. XBRL programming language will help in collecting, communicating, publishing, searching and exchanging of financial data with improved accuracy. Its open standards will help connect with proprietary (Closed) systems to communicate with each other.

How does XBRL work?

The XBRL programming language has defined an entirely new method of storing data. Conventionally financial data is stored as text but with XBRL each piece of data is stored under a tag. Data stored as text requires manual entering and extraction and it is difficult to automate. With data in XBRL tags, machines can interpret it, analyze, search and compare data with ease and the process is completely automated. These tags go beyond and define many other properties like grouping data under various heads, if it's a monetary item or a percentage or even a fraction. One of its greatest advantages is when it comes to comparing and trending data within the organization and against competition.

XML or Extensible Markup Language is slowly being adopted as the standard on the web to exchange, store and manipulate data. According to the principle of XML each set of data is described by a set of "tags" and the process is called "tagging". Software can read this data automatically and manipulate it.

A tag like 234899 can be easily read and compared to the same entity in another financial statement of an organizational unit or from the competition.

XBRL programming language has three main components to define data:

The values between tags

The Schema which defines how a term like Liability should be interpreted by the software

Linkbase which segregates the data into various categories

XBRL can show how data elements can have relationships with each other, how they are calculated and the purposes for which it can be used like for presentations or reporting.

What are the benefits of XBRL?

Data Reuse - Whether it is creating reports for publishing online, printing or filing, the same data has to be used repeatedly as all these functions require different output files. With an XML based file base, data output can be achieved in HTML, an XML file or any other format in which data is required for use.

Data Extraction - An even bigger problem with conventional data storage in text is using queries to extract data. It would be so convenient if data users can find specific answers for their queries like "provide sundry debt for past 3 years" from an accounting statement. XBRL programming language being on a XML platform allows machines to retrieve data in any format required.

Analysis-Decision making in organizations is a critical and regular function for executives. Availability of consistent and reliable data is the foundation of a good decision and more so with financial reporting. XBRL programming language allows quick and efficient data collection, analysis and creating trends to help business decisions.

Data manipulation - Data owners are often worried about data integrity when it comes to decentralizing and spreading it across the organization. They are also overloaded trying to satisfy different report demands from business owners in different formats of the same data. With XBRL the same financial information can be used across different reports with accuracy and integrity.

Data Access - XBRL programming language being completely machine read takes away any manual intervention and thus eliminating chances of error. Multiple overlapping can be automated on the fly using XBRL.

XBRL delivered to you

What can XBRL programming language be used for? The primary use of XBRL would be make available financial statements in a digital form with flexibility to manipulate the data.

Financial Statements - XBRL will help create financial statements for internal reporting and filing with various agencies efficiently and at the same time reusable.

Reporting - With the flexibility provided by XBRL information can be distributed extensively and with increased usability. Financial information can be exposed to analyst, investors and other stakeholders depending on the need and format.

Internal Data Aggregation- Organizations with multiple divisions can move to a common format for all divisions in XBRL format. This can then be collated and rolled up to the corporate level to produce consolidated reports. This helps automating the flow of data and automatically updating changes without any manual entries.

Interoperability - Any financial system can use XBRL programming language for their input and output formats can help standardization with other financial systems.

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