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An Introduction to XBRL

https://www.xbrl.org/the-standard/what/an-introduction-to-xbrl/

The basics of XBRL for business and accounting professionals.
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What is XBRL?

XBRL is the open international standard for digital business reporting, managed by a global not for profit consortium, XBRL International. We are committed to improving reporting in the public interest. XBRL is used around the world, in more than 50 countries. Millions of XBRL documents are created every year, replacing older, paper-based reports with more useful, more effective and more accurate digital versions.

In a nutshell, XBRL provides a language in which reporting terms can be authoritatively defined. Those terms can then be used to uniquely represent the contents of financial statements or other kinds of compliance, performance and business reports. XBRL lets reporting information move between organisations rapidly, accurately and digitally.

The change from paper, PDF and HTML based reports to XBRL ones is a little bit like the change from film photography to digital photography, or from paper maps to digital maps. The new format allows you to do all the things that used to be possible, but also opens up a range of new capabilities because the information is clearly defined, platform-independent, testable and digital. Just like digital maps, digital business reports, in XBRL format, simplify the way that people can use, share, analyse and add value to the data.

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Just as the standardised shipping container transformed global supply chains for goods, the standardisation of reporting concepts creates large and sometimes unexpected efficiencies in the business reporting supply chain.
What does XBRL do?

Often termed “bar codes for reporting”, XBRL makes reporting more accurate and more efficient. It allows unique tags to be associated with reported facts, allowing:

people publishing reports to do so with confidence that the information contained in them can be consumed and analysed accurately
people consuming reports to test them against a set of business and logical rules, in order to capture and avoid mistakes at their source
people using the information to do so in the way that best suits their needs, including by using different languages, alternative currencies and in their preferred style
people consuming the information to do so confident that the data provided to them conforms to a set of sophisticated pre-defined definitions
Comprehensive definitions and accurate data tags allow the:

preparation
validation
publication
exchange
consumption; and
analysis
of business information of all kinds. Information in reports prepared using the XBRL standard is interchangeable between different information systems in entirely different organisations. This allows for the exchange of business information across a reporting chain. People that want to report information, share information, publish performance information and allow straight through information processing all rely on XBRL.

In addition to allowing the exchange of summary business reports, like financial statements, and risk and performance reports, XBRL has the capability to allow the tagging of transactions that can themselves be aggregated into XBRL reports. These transactional capabilities allow system-independent exchange and analysis of significant quantities of supporting data and can be the key to transforming reporting supply chains.

Who uses it?

The international XBRL consortium is supported by more than 600 member organisations, from both the private and public sectors. The standard has been developed and refined over more than a decade and supports almost every kind of conceivable reporting, while providing a wide range of features that enhance the quality and consistency of reports, as well as their usability. XBRL is used in many different ways, for many different purposes, including by:

Regulators
Financial regulators that need significant amounts of complex performance and risk information about the institutions that they regulate.
Securities regulators and stock exchanges that need to analyse the performance and compliance of listed companies and securities, and need to ensure that this information is available to markets to consume and analyse.
Business registrars that need to receive and make publicly available a range of corporate data about private and public companies, including annual financial statements.
Tax authorities that need financial statements and other compliance information from companies in order to process and review their corporate tax affairs.
Statistical and monetary policy authorities that need financial performance information from many different organisations.
Companies
Companies that need to provide information to one or more of the regulators mentioned above.
Enterprises that need to accurately move information around within a complex group.
Supply chains that need to exchange information to help manage risk and measure activity.
Governments
Government agencies that are simplifying the process of businesses reporting to government and reducing red tape, by either harmonising data definitions or consolidating reporting obligations (or both).
Government