What is XBRL?

XBRL in an abbreviation of EXtensible Business Reporting Language.  XBRL is a global standards-based way of setting taxonomies (named Discoverable Taxonomy Set “DTS”) to encapsulate individual reporting concepts when communicating business and financial information. 

What does this mean?

What this means is instead of presenting financial information as a block of text as in a printed document - it provides an identifying tag for each individual item of data.  For example, company “total balance” would have its own unique tag.

Why is this important?

Investors, financial institutions, analysts, and regulators to name a few industries that rely on financial data can compare and analyze companies faster and more efficiently in this type of format.

Requirements for XBRL reporting

XBRL tagging is an additional document to the official HTML documents and attached to the submission as exhibits. The SEC requirements will be a phased in approach as follows:

·        Domestic and Foreign Large Accelerated companies that have a worldwide public common equity float of above 5 Billion the requirement will apply beginning with a periodic report on Form 10-Q, Form 20-F, form 40-F containing financial statements for a fiscal period ending 06/15/2009;

·        All other domestic and foreign Large Accelerated companies subject to these requirements will follow the next year beginning with a periodic report on Form 10-Q, Form 20-F, form 40-F containing financial statements for a fiscal period ending 06/15/2010;

·        All other filers including smaller reporting companies the requirement will apply beginning with a periodic report on Form 10-Q, Form 20-F, form 40-F containing financial statements for a fiscal period ending 06/15/2011;

Edgar Agents is here and ready to help you with all your XBRL detail tagging.  Please contact us for more information.