Johannesburg, 18 Jun 2003
Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) is a key emerging technology that will significantly change business reporting in coming years, according to the latest PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) Technology Forecast.
Yesterday the global professional services company released its Technology Forecast: 2003-2005, The Intelligent Real-Time Enterprise, which identifies technology trends helping companies achieve greater transparency and accountability.
Doug Franke, PwC e-business solutions partner, says regulators worldwide are getting tough on reporting standards, with requirements for greater transparency and more detail.
Until now, there were no standards that would allow financial information to be communicated automatically between different applications.
However, XBRL defines a consistent format for business reporting and the group says it will streamline how companies prepare and disseminate financial data and how analysts, regulators and investors review and interpret it.
According to the forecast, XBRL is a standard designed to eliminate the constraints of incompatible formats and vocabularies and to use recent trends in technology to enhance business reporting.
"It is a freely licensed data description standard and framework especially designed for structuring and representing information in business reports for extraction and processing by software applications," the forecast says.
The language is based on Extensible Markup Language (XML) and takes advantage of its ability to create self-describing data.
Franke says one of the benefits of XBRL is that users can take data from anywhere and any system and make sense of it.
"It doesn`t matter what system you use. You tag the information once and can use it many times for different purposes. It`s the same information, just rearranged for different users, like a regulator, the taxman, a shareholder.
"This is not sexy stuff - just management using information wisely."
Technology partner Ernst Maritz says the impact of XBRL on the business community will be more significant than the transition from paper and pencil analysis of financial information to the use of electronic spreadsheets.
"In the next three to five years, XBRL will move from the early adopter phase to become the generally accepted way to report business information," he says.
"As a result, corporations will simplify the process for issuing business reports and the public will find it easier to get the information they need to make informed investment decisions."
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