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The Accountant's Guide to XBRL
Table of contents:
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About The Book
XBRL (the eXtensible Business Reporting Language) is an emerging technology to standardize computerized
financial and business operations reporting. As of this writing, there are XBRL implementation programs and projects involving
financial and operations reporting going on all over the world. Several notable participants include the
U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and Securities and Exchange Commission, the Canadian Securities Administration, the
United Kingdon HM Revenue and Customs Corporate Tax Returns office, the German Stock Exchange,
the Japanese Securities and Exchange Commission
and the Bank of Japan, the Korean Stock Exchange, the Accounting & Corporate Regulatory Authority of Singapore,
the Belgian National Bank, and the Bank of Spain. XBRL is now a topic about which all
well-educated accountants should be knowledgeable.
The Accountant's Guide to XBRL (3rd edition) is a non-technical introduction to a technical subject. XBRL is
essentially a set of guidlines and rules for tagging (marking up) accounting and financial data items and a
format to report them in computer processable documents. Following the XBRL guidelines, business entities can tag
pieces of data in
a standard way so that each piece has information value and can be precisely interpreted by both humans and
computer software. As a non-technical example, a business entity reporting financial information according to US GAAP
could reporti its Accrued Advertising expenses of 2 million by looking up the appropriate tag name, AccruedAdvertising,
in the US GAAP XBRL v1.0 taxonomy and use it to tag the item in an XBRL document. In a very simplified
form, it could be tagged as follows:
<AccruedAdvertising>2000000</AccruedAdvertising>.
It is more technical than this because we
also need to specify what business entity is reporting this item, what currency it is reported in, what time
period it is being reported for, and how accruate it is. By following the XBRL guidelines, we can add this
information and thus report the item so that it is precisely interpretable by humans and software applications.
The Accountant's Guide to XBRL (3rd) is written to reflect the way I teach XBRL in my advanced accounting
information systems class at the University of Delaware. I have used and refined the approach over a number of
years and use a similar approach when teaching workshops to accounting educators and financial professionals.
The book includes chapters on the XML foundation (including UBL - the Universal Business Language), the basics of XBRL,
the XSLT processing language, the current
state of XBRL including software tools, and XBRL GL 2007. Each chapter includes content discussion, interactive exercises to test
your knowledge,
and end-of-chapter exercises for hands-on experience and to further your understanding. See the Table of Contents to
the left for more details. Chapter 1 is currently available for download. The book can be purchased through
PayPaltm as individual copies or in bulk.
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