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.
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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.

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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 …

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)
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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 …

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.
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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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …