XBRL – The RSS of the Financial World?

Do you work on financial systems?  Have you heard about eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL)?  It has been gaining popularity over the last couple years, and has seemed to hit the big time recently.  I don’t do a lot of financial statement type stuff, but I bumped into this XML based language while researching some SVG stuff.  It can be used to transfer financial statements, performance reports, accounting records, and other financial information between software programs. This royalty-free, open specification is being developed collaboratively to make it less costly for companies to publish financial information in a format that can be easily viewed and used by management, investors, regulators, and all of the participants in financial markets.  There are lots of other XML based financial languages (FpML, Fix, FinXML, and OFX), but they are used for transaction processing.  XBRL is used just for reporting.  Looks to me that XBRL could be the RSS (or Atom) of the Financial World.  One of the important uses of XBRL is for EDGAR filings, and XBRLExpress has a great digital dashboard that converts the XBRL EDGAR filings into interactive charts using SVG.  It is a very cool example of the power of SVG and XML.

DonXML