XBRL- Providing A Big Leap In Financial World
With the advent of XBRL the process can be expected to be smooth and will be beneficial in the long run. The management of the company, users of financial information etc goes through a difficult process when they need to compare their results with their rivals and peers. But XBRL has eliminated all such lengthy process. Now the data is within the reach and it enables the computer to get access to the data and get the meaningful information.
The old process of copy-pasting is done away with because the user computer can automatically extract the information. It also provides the benefit of tagging the source data which in turn makes the data machine-readable. XBRL enables tagging of numbers, textual information and quantitative information too.
Fundamental Terms in X BRL Financial Statements:
· Taxonomy: It is termed as an electronic dictionary of the reporting concepts containing various definition of business reporting terms as well as the relationship which exists between them and also the link connecting them. In short we can say that it is a catalogue or set of defined rules.
· Instance Document: The business reports which are created in electronic format according to the rules stated in XBRL is called an XBRL Instance document. It contains both values and explanation to the context in which they are placed
· Tags: Individual elements within taxonomy, e.g., net income. Assume that a company released its 20K with XBRL. One example of a XBRL tag is “usfr-pte: Net Income.” This is the tag that a company would attach to its US GAAP net income figure on its income statement
· Labels: If an element already exists within the standard taxonomy that can be used to represent our information but we do not like the standard label, do not add an additional element, just change the label.
· Extension: An XBRL extension is a taxonomy that extends an existing base taxonomy. The main idea behind an extension is to encourage business users to tailor the taxonomy to their specific needs, while using the elements of the base taxonomy to ensure comparability.
XBRL a boon or a bane?
XBRL will certainly remove the hassles and provide easy access to data and also the comparisons will be easier & time saving. Manual work will be less and therefore it will be cost effective too. It can be a great tool to improve communication with the stakeholders.
ACS Pankaj Khanna
CAclubindia
