EDGAR Resources

About the Extensible Business Reporting Language

XBRL

What is XBRL?

XBRL is an acronym for the Extensible Business Reporting Language. XBRL provides a means for tagging individual items of financial data.

By tagging the financial data, a structure and syntax is created. The data is differentiated from the text around it and becomes easily isolated, analysed, and mainpulated:

The introduction of XBRL tags enables automated processing of business information by computer software, cutting out laborious and costly processes of manual re-entry and comparison. Computers can treat XBRL data “intelligently”: they can recognise the information in a XBRL document, select it, analyse it, store it, exchange it with other computers and present it automatically in a variety of ways for users. XBRL greatly increases the speed of handling of financial data, reduces the chance of error and permits automatic checking of information.

Benefits

XBRL allows the processes of data preparation and presentation to become automated by removing the need for manual comparisions, entry, and re-entry. A single source of financial information can be shared and manipulated by different users for different purposes. Software can automatically check and validate XBRL data. It can also be shared across different platforms.

XBRL enables producers and consumers of financial data to switch resources away from costly manual processes, typically involving time-consuming comparison, assembly and re-entry of data. They are able to concentrate effort on analysis, aided by software which can validate and manipulate XBRL information. As just one example, searches for particular information which might in the past have taken hours can be completed with XBRL in a fraction of a second.

EDGARfilings & XBRL

EDGARIZER HTML was the first SEC EDGAR software to support XBRL documents. EDGARfilings will continue to be in the forefront of software and services that support the XBRL format and initiatives.

EDGARfilings is a proud member of the XBRL International consortium.