XBRL FAQ
XBRL International FAQ
Q. What is XBRL?
A. XBRL is a language for the electronic communication of business and financial data which is revolutionising business reporting around the world. It provides major benefits in the preparation, analysis and communication of business information. It offers cost savings, greater efficiency and improved accuracy and reliability to all those involved in supplying or using financial data. It is an open standard, free of licence fees, being developed by a non-profit making international consortium. Other pages on this web site provide detailed information on XBRL, its technical features and its business opportunities.
Q. What are the potential uses of XBRL?
A. XBRL can be applied to a very wide range of business and financial data. Among other things, it can handle:
- Company internal and external financial reporting.
- Business reporting to all types of regulators, including tax and financial authorities, central banks and goverments.
- Filing of loan reports and applications; credit risk assessments.
- Exchange of information between government departments or between other institutions, such as central banks.
- Authorative accounting literature – providing a standard way of describing accounting documents provided by authoritative bodies.
- A wide range of other financial and statistical data which needs to be stored, exchanged and analysed.
Q. What is the future of XBRL?
A. XBRL is set to become the standard way of recording, storing and transmitting business financial information. It is capable of use throughout the world, whatever the language of the country concerned, for a wide variety of business purposes. It will deliver major cost savings and gains in efficiency, improving processes in companies, governments and other organisations.
Q. Who developed XBRL?
A. XBRL is being developed by an international non-profit consortium of major companies, organisations and government agencies. These include the world’s leading accounting, technology, government and financial services bodies.
Q. What are the benefits to a company from putting its financial statements into XBRL?
A. XBRL increases the usability of financial statement information. The need to re-key financial data for analytical and other purposes can be eliminated. By presenting its statements in XBRL, a company can benefit investors and raise its profile. It will also meet the requirements of regulators, lenders and others consumers of financial information, who are increasingly demanding reporting in XBRL. This will improve business relations and lead to a range of benefits.
With full adoption of XBRL, companies can automate data collection. For example, data from different company divisions with different accounting systems can be assembled quickly, cheaply and efficiently. Once data is gathered in XBRL, different types of reports using varying subsets of the data can be produced with minimum effort. A company finance division, for example, could quickly and reliably generate internal management reports, financial statements for publication, tax and other regulatory filings, as well as credit reports for lenders. Not only can data handling be automated, removing time-consuming, error-prone processes, but the data can be checked by software for accuracy.
Q. How do companies create statements in XBRL?
A. There are a number of ways to create financial statements in XBRL:
- XBRL-aware accounting software products are becoming available which will support the export of data in XBRL form. These tools allow users to map charts of accounts and other structures to XBRL tags.
- Statements can be mapped into XBRL using XBRL software tools designed for this purpose.
- Data from accounting databases can be extracted in XBRL format. It is not strictly necessary for an accounting software vendor to use XBRL; third party products can achieve the transformation of the data to XBRL.
- Applications can transform data in particular formats into XBRL. For example, web sites are in operation which transform EDGAR filings in the United States into XBRL, providing more efficient access to specific data in the filings.
The route which an individual company may take will depend on its requirements and the accounting software and systems it currently uses, among other factors.
Q. How do I start putting XBRL to use in my organisation?
A. The first step is normally to contact your local XBRL organisation or “jurisdiction” — contact information is under XBRL Around the World. Programmes for the use of XBRL are already under way in many countries and you will find information on most of these under Projects in the XBRL in Action section or jurisdiction websites. These programmes will usually provide technical support or guidance for those taking part.
We do not provide a single “starter pack” for implementing XBRL because uses and circumstances vary greatly around the world, but plenty of support is available for adopters. If you cannot get local help, please contact info@xbrl.org.
XBRL also runs open discussion groups where non-members can ask for specific help: see the Discussion Groups page. Members can gain support from a range of internal groups.
Q. Why are Accounting Institutes around the world taking a major role in the XBRL consortium?
A. A core purpose of Accounting Institutes around the world is to enhance the access, quality and breadth of financial information available to the investing public. XBRL will help achieve this. Institutes also believe that the development of XBRL will help position their members as valued knowledge providers for their clients. Businesses, large and small, are undergoing fundamental change. Accountants, as the managers of the underlying language of business, can help organisations fit into the new digital world, solve business issues and capitilise on opportunities.
Q. Does XBRL cause a change in accounting standards?
A. No. XBRL is simply a language for transmitting information. It must accurately reflect data reported under different standards – it does not change them.
Q. How does XBRL impact International Reporting Standards?
A. The IASB is developing a taxonomy which reflects International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). National XBRL jurisidictions will extend this taxonomy to reflect their particular local implementation of IFRS. Taxonomies will thus be available to enable those reporting under IFRS in different countries to use XBRL, enhancing efficiency and comparability as adoption of IFRS expands around the world.
Q. Does XBRL benefit the comparability of financial statements?
A. XBRL benefits comparability by helping to identify data which is genuinely alike and distinguishing information which is not comparable.
Q. What are the differences between HTML, XML and XBRL?
A. HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) is a standard way of marking up a document so it can be published on the World Wide Web and viewed in a browser. It provides a set of pre-defined tags describe on how content appears in a browser. For example, it describes the font and color of text. It gives little information on meaning or context. XML (Extensible Markup Language) uses tags to identify the meaning, context and structure of data.
XML is a standard language which is maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). XML does not replace HTML; it is a complementary format that is platform independent, allowing XML data to be rendered on any device such as a computer, cell phone, PDA or tablet device. It enables rich, structured data to be delivered in a standard, consistent way. Whereas HTML offers a fixed, pre-defined number of tags, XML neither defines nor limits tags. Instead, XML provides a framework for defining tags (i.e. taxonomy) and the relationship between them (i.e. schema).
XBRL is an XML-based schema that focuses specifically on the requirements of business reporting. XBRL builds upon XML, allowing accountants and regulatory bodies to identify items that are unique to the business reporting environment. The XBRL schema defines how to create XBRL documents and XBRL taxonomies, providing users with a set of business information tags that allows users to identify business information in a consistent way. XBRL is also extensible in that users are able to create their own XBRL taxonomies that define and describe tags unique to a given environment.
Q. What is the difference between XBRL and FpML, Fix, FinXML, OFX, XML/EDI? Are all of these efforts needed?
A. All of these identified efforts are transaction-oriented specifications for specific purposes – except for XBRL. XBRL is reporting-oriented. All of these efforts are needed since they all serve different purposes. As these transaction-oriented specifications grow and develop, the need for business reporting that captures aggregate transactions becomes even more important. As a result, XBRL becomes more critical to organizations using XML technology.
Q. What kind of database should be used with XBRL?
A. XBRL is a format for exchanging information between applications. Therefore each application will store data in whatever form is most effective for its own requirements and import and export information in XBRL format so that it can be readily imported or exported in turn by other applications. In some applications, for example, the XBRL formatted information being used may be mostly tabular numeric information, hence easily manipulated in a relational database. In other applications, the XBRL information may consist of narrative document-like structures with a lot of text, so that a native XML database may be more appropriate. There is no mandatory relationship between XBRL and any particular database or other processing or storage architecture.
IASB FAQ
A. An XBRL taxonomy is an electronic description and classification system for the contents of financial statements and other business reporting documents.
XBRL taxonomies can be regarded as extensions of XML Schema, augmented with written documentation and a number of additional XML Linking (XLink) files.
Taxonomies may represent hundreds or even thousands of individual business reporting concepts, mathematical and definitional relationships among them, along with text labels in multiple languages, references to authoritative literature, and information about how to display each concept to a user.
A. XBRL Instances contain the reported data with their values and “contexts” (e.g. currency or reporting period). Instances must be linked to at least one taxonomy which define their contexts, labels or references.
A. An XBRL extension is a taxonomy extends an existing base taxonomy. The extension taxonomy may include, exclude or change information from the base taxonomy. The extension can be regarded as an overlay which modifies the structure of the taxonomy, adds and prohibits elements, their labels, linking, order of appearance and other characteristics. The main idea behind an extension is to encourage business users to tailor the taxonomy to their specific needs, while using the elements of the base taxonomy to ensure comparability.
A. XBRL Schemas together with linkbases define an XBRL taxonomy. The purpose of XBRL schemas is to define taxonomy elements (concepts) and give each concept a name and define its characteristics. It can be regarded as a container where elements and references to “linkbases” files are defined.
A. XBRL linkbases and XBRL Schemas define together an XBRL taxonomy. Taxonomies with only the core elements (concepts) defined in an XBRL Schema would be useless.
The purpose of XBRL linkbases is to combine labels and references to the concepts as well as define relationships between those concepts.
There are five different kinds of linkbases. Each has a special purpose:
- The label linkbase
The XBRL Consortium aim is to create and develop a world-wide standard for electronic business reporting. This requires for the taxonomies to represent business data in multiple language. Therefore it is possible to create an element (concept) in the taxonomy with labels in different languages and or for different purposes e.g. a short label PPE compared to its long label Property, plant and equipment. Those labels are stored and linked to their respective elements in a label linkbase. - The reference linkbase
Most of the elements appearing in taxonomies refer to particular concepts defined by authoritature literature. The reference linkbase stores the relationships between elements and the references e.g. IAS, para 68. The layer does not store the regulations themselves but the source identification names and paragraphs. - The presentation linkbase
Business reports are in general organised into identifiable data structures e.g. a Balance Sheet. The presentation linkbase stores information about relationships between elements in order to properly organise the taxonomy content. This enables a taxonomy user to view a one dimensional representation of the elements. - The calculation linkbase
The idea of a calculation linkbase is to improve quality of an XBRL report (XBRL instance). The calculation linkbase defines basic calculation validation rules (addition/substraction), which must apply for all instances of the taxonomy. For example two elements (concepts) A, B can be summed up to a third element (concept) C, such that C = A + B. - The definition linkbase
The definition linkbase stores other pre-defined or self-defined relationships between elements. For example a relationship can be defined that the occurrence of one concept within an XBRL instance mandates the occurrence of other concepts.
