XBRL is a freely available, market-driven, open, and global standard for exchanging business information. XBRL allows information modeling and the expression of semantic meaning commonly required in business reporting. XBRL is XML
XML
Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....
Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....
XML Linking Language, or XLink, is an XML markup language and W3C specification that provides methods for creating internal and external links within XML documents, and associating metadata with those links.-The XLink specification:...
xmlns tagged XML namespaces are used for providing uniquely named elements and attributes in an XML document. They are defined in a W3C recommendation. An XML instance may contain element or attribute names from more than one XML vocabulary...
to articulate this semantic meaning. One use of XBRL is to define and exchange financial information, such as a financial statement. The XBRL Specification is developed and published by XBRL International
XBRL International
XBRL International is the international standards organization which develops and maintains the XBRL Specification. It is a not-for-profit consortium of agencies and companies internationally, working together to build the XBRL language standard, and support and promote XBRL's adoption. As of...
, Inc. (XII).
XBRL is a standards-based way to communicate and exchange business information between business systems. These communications are defined by metadata
Metadata
The term metadata is an ambiguous term which is used for two fundamentally different concepts . Although the expression "data about data" is often used, it does not apply to both in the same way. Structural metadata, the design and specification of data structures, cannot be about data, because at...
Taxonomy is the science of identifying and naming species, and arranging them into a classification. The field of taxonomy, sometimes referred to as "biological taxonomy", revolves around the description and use of taxonomic units, known as taxa...
, which capture the definition of individual reporting concepts as well as the relationships between concepts and other semantic meaning. Information being communicated or exchanged is provided within an XBRL instance.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation is a United States government corporation created by the Glass–Steagall Act of 1933. It provides deposit insurance, which guarantees the safety of deposits in member banks, currently up to $250,000 per depositor per bank. , the FDIC insures deposits at...
The Committee of European Banking Supervisors was an independent advisory group on banking supervision in the European Union. Established by the European Commission in 2004 by Decision 2004/5/EC, and its charter revised on 23 January 2009, it was composed of senior representatives of bank...
(CEBS). Common functions in many countries that make use of XBRL include regulators of stock exchanges and securities, banking regulators, business registrars, revenue reporting and tax-filing agencies, and national statistical agencies. A wiki repository of XBRL projects is available to be freely explored and updated. An XBRL Adoption Survey is available as well. According to the FT
Financial Times
The Financial Times is an international business newspaper. It is a morning daily newspaper published in London and printed in 24 cities around the world. Its primary rival is the Wall Street Journal, published in New York City....
"the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in the US, the UK’s HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC), and Companies House in Singapore have begun to require companies to use it, and other regulators are following suit."
Specification
The current (2008) version of XBRL is 2.1, with errata corrections. The normative version of all the XML Schemas is provided in the specification documents, not in separate files. A conformance suite is available to test processors of XBRL documents.
XBRL Document Structure
In typical usage, XBRL consists of an XBRL instance, containing primarily the business facts being reported, and a collection of taxonomies
Taxonomy
Taxonomy is the science of identifying and naming species, and arranging them into a classification. The field of taxonomy, sometimes referred to as "biological taxonomy", revolves around the description and use of taxonomic units, known as taxa...
(called a Discoverable Taxonomy Set (DTS)), which define metadata about these facts, such as what the facts mean and how they relate to one another. XBRL uses XML Schema, XLink
XLink
XML Linking Language, or XLink, is an XML markup language and W3C specification that provides methods for creating internal and external links within XML documents, and associating metadata with those links.-The XLink specification:...
XPointer is a system for addressing components of XML based internet media.XPointer is divided among four specifications: a "framework" which forms the basis for identifying XML fragments, a positional element addressing scheme, a scheme for namespaces, and a scheme for XPath-based addressing...
Each XML document has exactly one single root element. This element is also known as the document element. It encloses all the other elements and is therefore the sole parent element to all the other elements....
. There may be more than one XBRL instance embedded in a larger XML document. The XBRL instance itself holds the following information:
Business Facts – facts can be divided into two categories
Items are facts holding a single value. They are represented by a single XML element with the value as its content.
Tuples are facts holding multiple values. They are represented by a single XML element containing nested Items or Tuples.
In the design of XBRL, all Item facts must be assigned a context.
Contexts define the entity (e.g. company or individual) to which the fact applies, the period of time the fact is relevant, and an optional scenario. Date and time information appearing in the period element must conform to ISO 8601
ISO 8601
ISO 8601 Data elements and interchange formats – Information interchange – Representation of dates and times is an international standard covering the exchange of date and time-related data. It was issued by the International Organization for Standardization and was first published in 1988...
. Scenarios provide further contextual information about the facts, such as whether the business values reported are actual, projected, or budgeted.
Units define the units used by numeric or fractional facts within the document, such as USD, shares. XBRL allows more complex units to be defined if necessary. Facts of a monetary nature must use a unit from the ISO 4217
ISO 4217
ISO 4217 is a standard published by the International Standards Organization, which delineates currency designators, country codes , and references to minor units in three tables:* Table A.1 – Current currency & funds code list...
namespace.
Footnotes use XLink to associate one or more facts with some content.
References to XBRL taxonomies, typically through schema references. It is also possible to link directly to a linkbase.
International Financial Reporting Standards are principles-based standards, interpretations and the framework adopted by the International Accounting Standards Board ....
An XBRL Taxonomy is a collection of taxonomy schemas and linkbases. A taxonomy schema is an XML schema
XML schema
An XML schema is a description of a type of XML document, typically expressed in terms of constraints on the structure and content of documents of that type, above and beyond the basic syntactical constraints imposed by XML itself...
Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....
XML Linking Language, or XLink, is an XML markup language and W3C specification that provides methods for creating internal and external links within XML documents, and associating metadata with those links.-The XLink specification:...
specification. The schema must ultimately extend the XBRL instance schema document and typically extend other published XBRL schemas on the xbrl.org website.
Taxonomy schemas define Item and Tuple "concepts" using elements. Concepts provide names for the fact and indicate whether or not it's a tuple or an item, the data type (such as monetary, numeric, fractional, or textual), and potentially more metadata. Items and Tuples can be regarded as "implementations" of concepts, or specific instances of a concept. A good analogy for those familiar with object oriented programming would be that Concepts are the classes and Items and Tuples are Object instances of those classes. This is the source of the use of the "XBRL instance" terminology. In addition to defining concepts, taxonomy schemas reference linkbase documents. Tuples instances are 1..n relationships with their parents; their metadata is simply the collection of their attributes.
Linkbases are a collection of Links, which themselves are a collection of locators, arcs, and potentially resources. Locators are elements that essentially reference a concept and provide an arbitrary label for it. In turn, arcs are elements indicating that a concept links to another concept by referencing the labels defined by the locators. Some arcs link concepts to other concepts. Other arcs link concepts to resources, the most common of which are human-readable labels for the concepts. The XBRL 2.1 specification defines five different kinds of linkbases.
Label Linkbase – This linkbase provides human readable strings for concepts. Using the label linkbase, multiple languages can be supported, as well as multiple strings within each language.
Reference Linkbase – This linkbase associates concepts with citations of some body of authoritative literature.
Calculation Linkbase – This linkbase associates concepts with other concepts so that values appearing in an instance document may be checked for consistency.
Definition Linkbase – This linkbase associates concepts with other concepts using a variety of arc roles to express relations such as is-a, whole-part, etc.
Presentation Linkbase – This linkbase associates concepts with other concepts so that the resulting relations can guide the creation of a user interface, rendering, or visualisation.
This is the taxonomy schema of the above shown instance file:
XBRL GL international, is an organisational section of XBRL that makes the international XBRL GL EDI standard for electronic accounting and financial report documents in XML format....
) is the only set of taxonomies that is developed and recommended by XII.
XBRL Modules
XBRL International has issued and reissued a stability pledge in relation to the core XBRL 2.1 specification. In addition to the core XBRL 2.1 specification, work continues on the development of XBRL modules that define new, compatible functionality.
XBRL Dimensions 1.0 – This module has achieved Public Recommendation status in 2005. A new edition of the Dimensions 1.0 Specification with errata corrections was issued on 7 September 2009. The Dimension 1.0 Specification is an optional extension to the XBRL 2.1 Specification that enriches the rules and procedures for constructing dimensional taxonomies and instance documents. It supports the use of XBRL taxonomy linkbases to define additional, structured contextual information for business facts. Each piece of contextual information is referred to as a "dimension." The base XBRL specification essentially defines three dimensions: reporting period, reporting entity (i.e.; a company or a division thereof), and a loosely-defined reporting scenario, originally intended to distinguish between actual vs. projected facts. Taxonomies using XBRL Dimensions can define new dimensions, specify the valid values ("domains") for dimensions, designate which dimensions apply to which business concepts through mechanisms called "hypercubes", and relate other taxonomy metadata (labels, presentation information, etc.) to dimensions.
XBRL Formula 1.0 – This module achieved Public Recommendation status 22 June 2009. The Formula Specification 1.0 supports the creation of expressions (using XPath) that can be applied to XBRL instances to validate its information or to calculate new XBRL facts in a new instance. To see how formula components interrelate, click Interactive diagram of related Formula specifications
XBRL Rendering – This module achieved Public Recommendation status 20 April 2010. The Inline XBRL (Rendering) Specification has two deliverables. One is "Inline XBRL", a specification for embedding XBRL inside XHTML. The other is a Specified Transformations registry. The registry will leverage the label and presentation linkbases to provide a facility for more comprehensive report definition. For example, the label linkbase can tell you that the English name for the ifrs-gp:assets concept is "Assets", and the presentation linkbase can tell you that ifrs-gp:assets is the first concept in the hierarchy named "Balance Sheet". The Rendering Linkbase would add the metadata that the "Balance Sheet" usually runs with the labels (in presentation order) down the former leftmost column, and then shows it with the two most recent periods within the next columns, in a particularly defined, structured order.
XBRL Versioning – This module will support the creation of a standard versioning report, which will document the differences between two versions of the same taxonomy. Many large taxonomies (such as the IFRS taxonomy) change every year.
Extensibility
Besides the creation of additional modules, XBRL International supports several methods for continuing expansion of shared XBRL functionality.
Link Role Registry – This registry, hosted at xbrl.org, collects link roles and arc roles to promote reuse across taxonomies.
Functions Registry – This registry collects XPath functions for reuse in formula linkbases.
Format Registry – This registry collects common numeric formats for reuse in Inline XBRL applications.
Best Practice RFCs – These documents will share common practices among community members to improve interoperability of design.
iXBRL
iXBRL (in-line Extensible Business Reporting Language) is a development of XBRL in which the XBRL tags are embedded in the formal document, e.g. a published report and accounts. It requires the formal document to be in XHTML
XHTML
XHTML is a family of XML markup languages that mirror or extend versions of the widely-used Hypertext Markup Language , the language in which web pages are written....
format so that the XBRL tags can be invisible when the document is viewed in a web browser or printed yet be present when the electronic file is processed or viewed in an XML editor
XML editor
An XML editor is a markup language editor with added functionality to facilitate the editing of XML. This can be done using a plain text editor, with all the code visible, but XML editors have added facilities like tag completion and menus and buttons for tasks that are common in XML editing, based...
.
There are two main ways of producing iXBRL documents:
a program can generate the iXBRL file from source data;
a version of a word processing package can be used which has been enhanced to handle the XBRL tags.
However, neither of these produces a native iXBRL document which is designed as a web page and marked up with XBRL tags. A good example of this is the IASC 2007 Annual Report
In the UK, HM Revenue and Customs requires businesses to submit their report and accounts and tax computations in iXBRL format when making their Corporation Tax return. Businesses and their agents can use HMRC's Online Filing software to prepare their report and accounts and tax computations in iXBRL format or they can prepare the iXBRL files themselves and submit them to HMRC.
HMRC's Online Filing software is an example of a program which generates iXBRL from source data. This uses a series of forms in which the key data (which will appear in XBRL tags) are entered in data entry fields. Additional data (the rest of the report and accounts) are entered in text boxes. The program generates the iXBRL report and accounts in a standard sequence of sections and a standard format. All other formatting of material is lost. While the resulting report and accounts meets HMRC's requirements, it is not an attractive document to view or read.
The word processing package which has been enhanced for iXBRL most widely is Microsoft Word
Microsoft Word
Microsoft Word is a word processor designed by Microsoft. It was first released in 1983 under the name Multi-Tool Word for Xenix systems. Subsequent versions were later written for several other platforms including IBM PCs running DOS , the Apple Macintosh , the AT&T Unix PC , Atari ST , SCO UNIX,...
. This allows "round-tripping" between its own format for the precise layout of documents and HTML through the use of non-standard extensions to HTML. The iXBRL tags are typically held as comments within the document.
One difference between XBRL and iXBRL is that in iXBRL a data item (e.g. profit) may appear repeatedly and is marked up as an XML tag each time it appears. With large and complex accounts, the resulting file may be too large for a web browser to handle. This happens more often when, as in the UK, the company report, which may contain many graphics, is combined with the accounts in a single iXBRL document. The iXBRL specification allows for a set of iXBRL documents to be treated as a single iXBRL document set ("IXDS").
History
XBRL's beginning can be traced to the initial efforts of one person, Charles Hoffman, a certified public accountant from Tacoma, Washington. The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) was also instrumental in pulling together what eventually became XBRL International. See http://www.xbrl.org/history.aspx for more information.
The specification has gone through several versions, all of which are still available.
1.0 – This version was based on DTDs. It expressed the difference between data exchange in instance documents and metadata exchange in taxonomy documents. Taxonomies were expressed as XML Schema files, but these were not used for instance validation.
2.0 – This version introduced use of XML Schema substitution groups as a way of allowing schema validation of instances. Concept relations were broken out into separate XLink based linkbases. Context data in the instance was collected into a separate element.
2.1 – This version tightened the definition of terms significantly, allowing for the introduction of a conformance suite.
Standard Business Reporting is a group of international programs instigated by a number of governments to reduce the regulatory burden for business....
– In 2003 the Dutch government started the Netherlands Taxonomy Project (NTP) to create a multi agency taxonomy and communication infrastructure. The Dutch government now collaborates with Australia, New Zealand and Singapore in Standard Business Reporting (SBR) programs. The key objectives of SBR include reduced time and effort spent preparing and filing reports for government by businesses. SBR can be considered an application profile of XBRL.
XBRLS is an application profile of XBRL.XBRLS is designed to be 100% XBRL compliant. The stated goals of XBRLS are "to maximize XBRL's benefits, reduce costs of implementation, and maximize the functionality and effectiveness of XBRL"...
– In 2008 Charlie Hoffman and Rene van Egmond proposed a simplified, user-friendly XBRL application profile of XBRL that makes using XBRL easier for most business users, improves the potential for interoperability, and improves the potential for comparability needed by most business users, business communities, regulators and independent software vendors.
North Carolina State University at Raleigh is a public, coeducational, extensive research university located in Raleigh, North Carolina, United States. Commonly known as NC State, the university is part of the University of North Carolina system and is a land, sea, and space grant institution...
Department of Accounting College of Management evaluated the accuracy of XBRL filings for 22 companies participating in the SEC’s voluntary filing program in 2006. Results of a comparison of XBRL filings to Forms 10-K
Form 10-K
A Form 10-K is an annual report required by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission , that gives a comprehensive summary of a public company's performance...
revealed multiple errors in signage, amounts, labeling, and classification. The study considers that these errors are serious since XBRL data is computer-readable and users will not visually recognize the errors, especially when using XBRL analysis software.
External links
The official XBRL web site – source for the XBRL specification, a repository for financial reporting taxonomies, the Global Ledger taxonomy, and adoption resources
American Council for Technology and Industry Advisory Council
The American Council for Technology and Industry Advisory Council is a non-profit public-private partnership dedicated to improving government through the application of information technology...
(ACT-IAC) (a non-profit, public-private partnership dedicated to improving government)
