Is Your Investor Relations Web Site Ready For XBRL?

By Diane Mueller, JustSystems

The U.S. SEC recently issued new rules requiring companies to provide financial statement information on their corporate web sites in an interactive data format using the eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL). This is good news because XBRL has the potential to increase the speed, accuracy and usability of financial disclosures for investors while also ultimately reducing corporate costs.

The XBRL Challenge

Until now, individual investors could obtain only high-level key financial figures for large companies with stock price history from sites like Yahoo! Finance and MSN Money. Institutional investors and research firms with deeper pockets could obtain real-time financial data feeds from pay-per-view data aggregators like EDGAR Online. However, these data sources are highly normalized, disconnected from the source and lack any semantic annotations. In greater detail, these data sources are fed by automated screen-scraper aggregation applications culling information from the HTML or ASCII filings and then are mapped to the data aggregators' various relational databases. This extraction process is expensive and error-prone — especially when data has to be remapped to data aggregators' relational databases prior to distribution to their various subscription-based data feeds. Also lost in this aggregation process are essential features of financial information: access to the reporting entities' ‘as-reported' stories, trust in the authenticity of the content, and granular detail. Data aggregated in this manner is not able to reflect the reporting entities' as-reported financials.