XBRL International is seeking feedback on a new document that examines the future business requirements and technical roadmap for eXtensible Business Reporting Language.

The Financial Accounting Standards Board and its overseer, the Financial Accounting Foundation, are forming a team to take over responsibility for managing XBRL taxonomies for U.S. financial reporting purposes.

One of the annoying things about printed documents in this electronic age is that you have to do quite a lot of work to turn them back into machine-useable form. This is particularly true of complex documents like a company’s report and accounts.

In an age when everyone wants more transparency, XBRL is at the center of this major shift in financial reporting. With the SEC mandate that began last June and continues to add more filers and more detailed filing, it is critical to stay up to date on the latest developments.

One of the memes of medical banking is the role transparency can play to wring out the fraud in the healthcare system. One of the topics I’ve been monitoring has been the global adoption of eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL–pronounced eks-Burl).

The SEC issued a mandate to require all registrants to “tag” their SEC filings using XBRL over a 3- year period. The largest companies began tagging their filings for periods ended after 6/15/09. For the first year, registrants are permitted to “block tag” their footnotes. This means each footnote can be one tag.

Your next annual set of accounts, together with your CT600 and computations, may well need to be filed online using a radically new data format. Are you ready?

XBRL stands for eXtensible Business Reporting Language, which is basically a way of labelling financial information to allow it to be automatically processed by software. And it’s very useful for finance departments.

Following three years of voluntary XBRL submissions, the SEC’s mandatory requirements for XBRL financial report submissions began phasing in June 15, 2009. As with any new process, companies can easily underestimate the challenges posed by this complex reporting technology and make mistakes along the way.

It’s important to have a sense of perspective about XBRL: it is a means, not the end, of data reporting. An XBRL system is neither the beginning nor the end of a data point; instead, think of XBRL as a postal system. The starting point begins with an accounting/finance system or other data source and the endpoint is a data repository.