XBRL
AdvancedXBRL, short for eXtensible Business Reporting Language, is a standard digital format for business and financial reports that tags each piece of data, so that computers can read, compare and analyse financial information automatically.
Traditional financial reports are designed for people to read, as documents or web pages. XBRL adds machine-readable tags to each figure, identifying what it is, such as revenue or total assets, the period it covers and the currency.
This makes it much easier for regulators, investors, analysts and data providers to extract and compare information across many companies without manually copying numbers.
For example, an analyst could use XBRL data to instantly compare the revenue growth and profit margins of hundreds of companies in the same industry, rather than reading each annual report.
Many regulators require XBRL. The US Securities and Exchange Commission has required listed companies to file financial statements in XBRL since 2009, and now uses inline XBRL, which embeds tags in a human-readable document. The European Union requires listed companies to publish annual reports in a single electronic format with XBRL tagging. XBRL is maintained by XBRL International, a non-profit organisation.
For worked examples and full lessons, visit notesbysara.org.