XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) is a royalty-free, international information format designed specifically for business information, also referred to as “interactive data” by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The concept of XBRL is that all individual disclosure items within business reports are assigned unique electronically readable tags (like a barcode). These tags are mapped to taxonomies that are being developed by market constituents and are publicly available on the XBRL website. Taxonomies are, in essence, dictionaries of financial concepts in which each concept is defined and assigned a relationship to other concepts.
XBRL has been a journey of high and lows that met with great success in 2008. Success is defined as (1) the acceptance of this new tool in the broad-based business and business-reporting community and (2) the use of this tool in areas broader than just financial statement information. Those two fundamental beliefs grounded some early decisions that the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) believes will make XBRL a critical foundation for business and government in the decades to come. (Read the AICPA publication XBRL: The story of our new language.)
About Me
- Paul-Emile Roy, CPA, CA
- Paul-Emile Roy is an independent researcher and consultant. For 25 years, he served as a Principal in the Research Studies Department at the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants (CICA) in Toronto, Canada. During that time, he managed more than 50 research projects involving hundreds of volunteers and consultants from academe, public accounting, industry, finance, government and various regulatory bodies. He is an aspiring archivist, historian and genealogist.
Role of Social Media in Performance Reporting
CICA Discussion Brief - 2012