A useful quick summary of What you need to know about XBRL from a UK tax filing perspective can be found on AccountingWeb. A key point is that if you are able to submit a ‘Short Company Tax Return’ via the HMRC’s online portal as a PDF file, then all the necessary conversion to XBRL will be done for you by HMRC’s web application.

The Japanese Institute of CPAs has produced a sweet cartoon explaining XBRL for newbies like Mr. Sato. This introduction makes a number of useful points, especially about the differences between HTML (rendering data) and XBRL (contextualizing data) and the potential for XBRL-tagged report data to improve analyst productivity and facilitate the automated auditing of data and translation of data labels between jurisdictions.

This brief lesson in corporate transparency Author’s Choice: Don’t Ignore the Transparency Imperative advocates that transparency is not just about presenting accurate, accessible and comparable information (e.g. using globally adopted standards such as XBRL) it is also about establishing a new level of engagement with the stakeholders of an organization.

An interesting post at the Accounting Elf discusses how financial statements should be more like blogs. With the rise of social media and the generally higher expectations of information consumers, this is an important topic. Financial reports are after all just a channel of communication between an organization and its stakeholders and there’s certainly a lot that could be done in this area.

Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) spending is increasing in the face of more regulation and investor demand, which is why Continuous Control Monitoring (CCM) software is expected to be a top investment in 2010 according to analysts AMR Research. The interest in CCM is another good reason for using XBRL internally within your organization.

The XBRL International Standards Board at XBRL.org have recently published an interesting document that calls for input on ways to evolve the XBRL specification over the next decade. They identify 3 key goals.

I am indebted to Conor O’Kelly for his tweeting about Sage, a leading UK SME ERP vendor, taking XBRL seriously. Sage has established an XBRL microsite to cover all aspects of their engagement with XBRL and provided an ‘everything you need to know’ white paper to outline their thoughts. What’s useful about this paper is that it clearly lays out the Sage product roadmap for supporting XBRL/iXBRL across their diverse product range. A paragon of clarity and transparency, just like XBRL.

KPMG have published some useful guidance for UK corporations in a short paper called Demystifying XBRL. Despite starting with the rather odd assertion that XBRL tags work in a similar way to barcodes (er, no), the paper has lots of great advice for prospective UK filers of iXBRL-based Corporation Tax (CT) returns – especially in sections 6-8. The paper supports the upcoming UK iXBRL Roadshow, which no matter how you spin it, just doesn’t sound that exciting…

The C words – complexity and chaos or clarity and communication are at the root of the Global Accounting Alliance’s (GAA) latest report – Making Financial Reporting Simpler and More Useful (The Way Forward). People seem to think that financial reporting is too complex, there is not enough clarity and that existing standards, as they evolve guided by committees of blind watchmakers, are contributing to the chaos

There’s a very interesting debate going on over at Daniel Robert’s blog that began by considering the extra effort that will be required for footnote tagging but in the comment thread moved to consideration of the process of S.E.C. XBRL reporting. Here I’d like to draw attention to the focal point of where any process ’savings’ are likely to be made.