How
XBRL Works
XBRL uses XML data tags to describe financial information for public and
private companies and other organizations. XBRL International and the
local jurisdictions collaboratively produce standard specifications and
taxonomies that anyone can license for use in applications. The XBRL
language is available to license royalty-free worldwide from XBRL
International.
Specifications
The XBRL commnity creates specifications.
The technical specification is a document that describes, in technical
terms, how a financial statement is created to the XBRL specification.
XBRL allows software vendors, programmers and end users who adopt it as a
specification to enhance the creation, exchange, and comparison of
business reporting information. Business reporting includes, but is not
limited to, financial statements, financial information, non-financial
information, general ledger transactions, and regulatory filings such as
annual and quarterly financial statements.
Taxonomies
The XBRL community creates taxonomies to describe in a standard way how business reporting information are to be
described. An XBRL taxonomy is a standard description and classification
system for the contents of accounting reports. XBRL taxonomies can be
regarded as extensions of XML Schema. Information producers take their
accounting information from their accounting system, and code it in a
standard fashion as described by the taxonomy. For example, in financial
statement reporting, an electronic Annual Report would, for example,
contain financial statements, auditors report and notes, all coded and
identified in XBRL. The instance document can be read directly by computer
programs or end-users or, more likely, coupled with a style sheet to
produce a printed annual report, user-friendly Web pages or Adobe Acrobat
file. Similarly, internal business reports and regulatory filings can be
output in a variety of forms.
Instance Documents
An instance document is an XML file that
contains business reporting information as XBRL elements and represents a
collection of financial facts using tags from one or more taxonomies.
Examples of instance documents include: an annual financial statement
encoded in XBRL, a file containing the figures from a company earnings
release, and a file containing a large number of ledger transactions.