Business reporting is undergoing a fundamental transformation. Market demand and regulatory requirements for business information and transparency in the reporting process have increased significantly. The Internet has created a ubiquitous infrastructure for global, local, intra-enterprise, and inter-enterprise connectivity. New data interchange standards have emerged that allow relevant information to be produced in an agreed-upon format and shared across organizational and geographical boundaries.
The Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) is a business reporting standard that is designed to eliminate the constraints of incompatible data formats and vocabularies and to use recent trends in technology to enhance business reporting. XBRL is being created, advanced, and promoted by a varied group of organizations. The membership of the non-profit consortium XBRL International includes regulators, services companies, software vendors, professional services providers, and accounting and trade organizations.
XBRL International has developed the XBRL specification, a formal and detailed definition of XBRL designed for use by software developers. Major elements of XBRL include a mechanism for naming, describing, and structuring business information; specifications for the way data elements should be structured; and documents containing the business information.
This whitepaper provides a discussion of the benefits of XBRL, its impact on the corporate reporting supply chain, an overview of the various components of the standard and how it works, status of global adoption, and status of XBRL-enabled software, as well as an interview with PwC's Mike Willis, a founding chairman of XBRL International.
To obtain printed copies, please contact your nearest
PwC office.
