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XBRL for business reporting: positioned to become the global standard. (Standards).

Article Excerpt
Industry consortia are increasingly coming together to draw up XML standards for businesses.

One of the major emerging standards is XBRL: eXtensible Business Reporting Language. Organized by more than 170 finance, accounting, regulatory, and software companies from across the world, XBRL is emerging as the definitive standard for expressing business information contained in corporate documents. With XBRL, each piece of a company's reported information is represented in XML and can be searched and extracted depending on business requirements. Given that more than 80% of major U.S. public companies provide some type of financial disclosure on the Internet, XBRL is invaluable for stakeholders, analysts, investors, and regulators because it streamlines the collection and electronic distribution of this information.

The XBRL standard is an open, freely licensed standard and can be downloaded as an XML Schema at the XBRL.org Web site. In March 2002, Microsoft became the first technology company to publish its financial statements on the Internet using XBRL. Since then, companies such as Morgan Stanley, EDGAR Online, Reuters, and DaimlerChrysler have started to use it to document their business reports. XBRL is also used in several countries outside the U.S.: every lending institution in Australia, for example, currently reports to the Australian Prudential Regulatory Authority using XBRL. Already, vendors like Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, and Hyperion have committed to XBRL-enabling their financial-reporting applications.

The Business Requirement

Companies create many kinds of business reports, including financial statements, general ledger...

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