During this morning’s Open Meeting the SEC said that it plans to require companies to file their financial results using XBRL. Under the proposed schedule, 500 of the largest public companies would begin filing their financial data in XBRL in early 2009.

Most of the remaining companies will have to comply within the following two years.

This implementation is based on the Advisory Committee on Financial Reporting recommendation made back in January.

A great introduction to XBRL by Charles Hoffman, CPA. This is apparently Charlie’s first attempt at video, and although a little slow it does a great job of explaining how XBRL works.

This past Friday SEC Chairman Christopher Cox announced the launch of the “Financial Explorer” on the SEC Web site to help investors quickly and easily analyze the financial results of public companies. Financial Explorer paints the picture of corporate financial performance with diagrams and charts, using financial information provided to the SEC as “interactive data” in eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL).

Financial Explorer is easily the most impressive XBRL based application that we have seen to date. It does a great job of taking the complex explanation of XBRL and puts it into an easy to read format. Using the XBRL data from each issuer the Financial Explorer generates key financial ratios, graphs, and charts. Information including earnings, expenses, cash flows, assets, and liabilities are all displayed graphically and can easily be compared across competing public companies.

Below is an example of Microsoft’s latest filing (to date, there have been 307 such filings from 74 companies).

The software takes the work out of manipulating the data by entirely eliminating tasks such as copying and pasting rows of revenues and expenses into a spreadsheet. That frees investors to focus on their investments’ financial results through visual representations that make the numbers easier to understand.

Aloca’s Income statement can be found here. Note the small chart icon that represents year over year results, a nice touch that significantly improves the readability of the statement.

“XBRL is fast becoming the universal language for the exchange of business information and it is the future of financial reporting,” said Chairman Cox. “With Financial Explorer or another XBRL viewer, investors will be able to quickly make sense of financial statements. In the near future, potentially millions of people will be able to analyze and compare financial statements and make better-informed investment decisions. That’s a big benefit to ordinary investors.”

Financial Explorer is open source, meaning the code that runs it is free to the public. As interactive data becomes broadly accepted there will be many more applications like Financial Explorer that will help investors and issuers communicate more efficiently and more effectively than ever before.

Is your company filing in XBRL or considering it? Let us know what you think by leaving a comment below.

Technorati Tags: Q4 Web Systems, Q4, Investor Relations, IR Web Sites, Corporate Disclosure, XBRL, Interactive Data, Corporate Reporting, Financial Reporting

Although XBRL has been around for 10 years now ( the history of XBRL ), the adoption and acceptance has only begun to significantly accelerate during 2007 with the support of Christopher Cox and the SEC. As part of the recent SEC draft advisory document “ SEC Advisory on Financial Reporting” there are details on the mandating of XBRL filing (see pages 74 to 87 in the PDF). The full report can be downloaded here (3MB) Read the complete Post.

CSR is a big word and seems to attract attention from many aspects. 

Unfortunately, recent survey results suggest many US companies are not going to impliment such a policy this year either.  This news is from a slightly different perspective than I’m used to reading it from, being an HR based company - but CSR covers a lot of ground and there’s room for everyone.

I think I like the perspective of this opinion bit - that CSR comes from community and government enforcement.  Waiting for businesses to change on their own will take too much time…

I think what makes CSR that much harder is that it’s so hard to measure, in terms that mean the right things to the right people, anyhow.  There are guidelines available - and a place to read the reports - but I still haven’t found a good way to reflect on them as a group, yet.

In case you’re not familiar with XBRL – it stands for eXtensible Business Reporting Language. The idea behind XBRL is simple. Instead of treating financial information as a block of text - as in a standard Internet page or a printed document - it provides an identifying tag for each individual item of data. This is computer readable. For example, company net profit has its own unique tag. Read the complete Post.

Another XBRL post… 

Yesterday the SEC held a press conference to announce the completion of the US GAAP Taxonomy which is made up of roughly 60 data tags. Based on US GAAP this new taxonomy is helping to ensure that teh filing of XBRL can now be automated for all issuers.

The finalized set of data tags (aka taxonomy) has been organized into 16 topics and is now in the hands of the 6 large accounting firms with their review being submitted to the SEC sometime next week.

The next key step for XBRL US and the SEC is how to move from the current voluntary program to market acceptance. By the spring of 2008 the SEC should announce their plans for having all US issuers submit all disclosure in an interactive format. The requirement for all companies to begin filing using interactive data sounds looks like sometime in the fall of 2008.

You can view the complete webcast here.

Technorati Tags: Q4 Web Systems, Q4, XBRL, Disclosure, Disclosure Risk, Disclosure Risk Management, Q4 PRESS

Last Thursday the SEC Chairmen Christopher Cox announced that the combined market capitalization of companies submitting interactive data financial reports to the SEC has surpassed $2 trillion. 7 companies have joined over the last 3 months bringing the total voluntary group to just 40.

“The continued positive feedback from our enthusiastic group of test filers means that interactive disclosure is well on its way to becoming reality,” said Chairman Cox. “Investors in the future will have instant, user-friendly access to company disclosures that are far more accurate than anything that is possible with today’s EDGAR.”

Interactive data refers to financial information provided using XBRL (”eXtensible Business Reporting Language”) or any other computer software language that labels companies’ financial data with codes from standard lists called “taxonomies” so that investors and analysts can more easily locate and analyze desired information in a public company’s financial statements.

This milestone is one of many related to XBRL and there is sure to be more in the near future.  XBRL (aka interactive data) is an important trend in disclosure and is one of the main elements in transforming how market analysts and ordinary investors obtain and use financial information.

Interactive disclosure is an important trend for us here at Q4 and is impacting many of our soon to be released products. Look for XBRL based disclosure extensions to show up in Q4 PRESS in the near future.

Technorati Tags: Q4 Web Systems, Q4, XBRL, Disclosure, Disclosure Risk, Disclosure Risk Management, Q4 PRESS

Yesterday the CSA formally launched their XBRL voluntary filing program that was announced back in January. Here’s the press release from OSC’s web site.  

Toronto - The Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA) announced today the launch of the eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) voluntary filing program. The voluntary program will help the Canadian marketplace gain practical knowledge and experience preparing and using financial statements in XBRL format.

XBRL is an emerging business reporting language designed to make it easier for investors and analysts to quickly access data and analyze information from a greater number of companies. When using XBRL, “tags” are assigned to pieces of data, and these tags provide information about what the data represents. For the voluntary program, the pieces of data are the content of financial statements, such as revenue or net income.

“We believe this technology will be a great step forward in helping investors analyze financial information, ” said Jean St-Gelais, Chair of the CSA and President & Chief Executive Officer of the Autorité des marchés financiers (Québec). “We are confident that the Canadian marketplace will recognize the benefits to investors of filing in XBRL format.”

The CSA will make the XBRL financial statements available to the public through SEDAR.com. The website links to the CSA’s XBRL website, which contains more information about XBRL and the voluntary program. Issuers wishing to participate in the voluntary program should contact one of the CSA staff members listed on this website: www.csa-acvm.ca/html_CSA/xbrl.html.

The CSA, the council of the securities regulators of Canada’s provinces and territories, co-ordinates and harmonizes regulation for the Canadian capital markets.

Technorati Tags: Disclosure, SOX, XBRL, Corporate reporting, Q4 Web Systems, Q4

According to the Financial Times, Christopher Cox announced yesterday that the SEC is going to formalize a new rule to require all companies to report financial information in XBRL.

This is not surprising, especially considering the consistent messages we’ve been hearing from Cox regarding the benefits of interactive data (aka XBRL) it seemed just a matter of time until it was to be mandated. As of today there’s been no mentioned about when this rule will be put in place and it’s not formally listed on the SEC web site.

Cox said the formalizing of the rule was part of the SEC’s ‘war on complexity and said the new format would ‘enable investors to find what they need quickly and reliable, without having to pore through pages and pages of documents.’

XBRL and structured data will bring many benefits to the market and the only way this will happen is if it’s mandated by the SEC. We look forward to seeing this finalized as soon as possible.

Technorati Tags: SEC, XBRL, Disclosure, Corporate reporting, EDGAR, Q4 Web Systems, Q4, Christopher Cox, Investor Relations