20090312 xbrl - plembo/onemoretech GitHub Wiki

title: xbrl link: https://onemoretech.wordpress.com/2009/03/12/xbrl/ author: lembobro description: post_id: 365 created: 2009/03/12 01:36:28 created_gmt: 2009/03/12 01:36:28 comment_status: open post_name: xbrl status: publish post_type: post

xbrl

If you tuned in to C-SPAN today you got to hear Darrell Issa (R-CA) go on about the XBRL “data format” and how the Treasury should be forcing financial institutions to start submitting their filings in it. Issa is not one of my favorite Congressmen, but when I hear someone talking about what’s obviously a markup language, I get interested.

According to a blurb on the xbrl.org web site:

The idea behind XBRL, eXtensible Business Reporting Language, is simple. Instead of treating financial information as a block of text - as in a standard internet page or a printed document - it provides an identifying tag for each individual item of data. This is computer readable. For example, company net profit has its own unique tag…

Companies can use XBRL to save costs and streamline their processes for collecting and reporting financial information. Consumers of financial data, including investors, analysts, financial institutions and regulators, can receive, find, compare and analyse data much more rapidly and efficiently if it is in XBRL format.

As Rep. Issa pointed out today, public filings are already being made on an experimental basis with the SEC. For example, the latest 8K from General Electric.

One of the difficulties with regulatory filings in the past was that they were not “machine readable”. Companies would submit their forms in either text or an SEC approved version of HTML, sometimes supplemented with magnetic tape. Going to a standard business-oriented markup language would dramatically simplify things, and eliminate the need for extracting and massaging of the information.

The big news here, though, is that our elected representatives are beginning to get it when it comes to what serious technology solutions can do, even a humble markup language.