XBRL for Financial Data & Extra Income $$$

There is a language that is commonly used in the business and financial reporting. Some of you may have already heard of XBRL. It's a language for the electronic communication.

It provides major benefits in the preparation, analysis and communication of business information. It offers cost savings, greater efficiency and improved accuracy and reliability to all those involved in supplying or using financial data.

XBRL stands for eXtensible Business Reporting Language and is already in use for more than 10 years.

XBRL is a member of the family of languages based on XML (Extensible Markup Language), which is a standard for the electronic exchange of data between businesses and on the internet. I’ve been exposed to XML language in my work just that I don't bothered to find out more about it. Now, at least, I have some basic understanding of it :P

If, and only if, you want to find out more details on XBRL, please visit it's official website: http://www.xbrl.org/Home/

XBRL is useful for consumers of financial data eg investors, analysts, financial institutions and regulators - can receive, find, compare and analyse data much more rapidly and efficiently.

An example of XBRL

This is a small example of XBRL -- intended for reading by computers, not humans.


With the proper tools, it will convert the above XBRL data into human readable form.

Regulators and XBRL

By introducing XBRL for reporting, regulators and other authorities can:

• Obtain data which can be entered automatically into systems without rekeying, reformatting or other "translation" effort.
• Dramatically reduce costs by automating routine tasks.
• Quickly and automatically identify problems with filings.
• Analyse and compare data much more quickly, efficiently and reliably.
• Monitor data and activities and reach judgements with far greater speed and confidence.
• Promote efficiencies and cost savings throughout the regulatory filing process.

Pick our neighbour for example. The Accounting & Corporate Regulatory Authority Singapore (ACRA) has made it compulsory for all the incorporated companies in Singapore to submit their audited financial statement for financial year beginning from 1 January 2007 in partial or full XBRL format (ACRA introduced XBRL in 2006). I'm not sure what's the different. I'm still awaiting for further details from the Corporate Secretarial company.

There is a guide on the XBRL submission, please visit ACRA’s website: http://www.acra.gov.sg/

Back home, this is a good news for those who provide the Corporate Secretarial services, you can increase your fee income in the future by assisting those incorporated companies to file it's audited financial statements in XBRL format, should the regulator implements it. However, very likely that most of the companies would to do it on their own to save cost mah (this what my company is doing...hah hah). But we still have other smaller companies where they may not have the resources, e.g. finance executives, to do it. You guys can charge a hundred or two, I think.

Companies Commission of Malaysia (CCM), where are you now?