What is XBRL?

XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) is an open specification, which uses XML-based data tags to describe financial statements for both public and private companies. It is intended for use in the preparation and exchange of business reports and data.

XBRL was developed to provide an XML-based framework that global businesses can use to create, exchange, and analyze financial reporting information including annual and quarterly financial statements, general ledger information, and audit schedules. An XBRL Taxonomy is a "vocabulary" or "dictionary" created by a group, compliant with the XBRL Specification, created to exchange business information.

Taxonomies can be attained from many outside sources. The website http://www.xbrl.org/ has a repository of taxonomies that they have released.In addition, some large companies have created their own taxonomies and these can be used to tag a document.

XBRL is freely licensed and facilitates the automatic exchange and reliable extraction of financial information among various software applications anywhere in the world. For more information on XBRL, see the XBRL website.