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XBRL will make business data easier to access. Just as English is the universal language of commercial pilots, so XBRL soon will be the lingua franca for all business reporting--from issuing financial statements to banks and shareholders to filing 10-Ks with the SEC or uploading business information onto a Web site. The development surely will revolutionize how business data are reported. used and calculated. The good news is that, in most cases, you won't have to learn anything to be able to read or write XBRL--which stands for extensible business reporting language--because it will be built into most, if not all, accounting and financial reporting software. Once added to the software, it will automatically and transparently translate all the business information you choose--numbers and words--so each segment of data is identified when viewed by a Web browser or sent to a spreadsheet application for calculation or examination. Even better news is XBRL won't require extra attention from CPAs and other financial managers and will make their work easier to perform and more effective: improving access to and the usability of financial data no matter whether the information is from a business or an association or whether the entity is large or small, public, private or nonprofit. Additionally, XBRL will reduce the cost of processing, calculating and formatting financial information because, once the data are created and formatted the first time, they never have to be keyed in a second time or reformatted for any special presentations. The bottom line is that XBRL will expand professional opportunities for CPAs and other financial executives and add value to financial information for all users: auditors, preparers, bankers, shareholders--in short, anyone who creates, uses or accesses an organization's business data. AND IT'S FREE If all this sounds like incredible hype--and even a modern-day challenge to the biblical story of the Tower of Babel (see XBRL: Rebuilding a Tower of Babel)--consider this: Soon after the idea for the concept was floated in 1999, software giants such as Microsoft and IBM immediately grasped its potential and recognized that the only way a common standard could be developed was if the software and financial communities agreed to cooperate in establishing a standard rather than seeking to compete with their proprietary versions of the program. And agree they did--and quickly. The best news is that XBRL is free. And that's despite the fact that many organizations are investing a great deal of money and time on the work. As a result, software companies will not have to pay to include the XBRL code in their software, and each new edition--and there will be many because the program is sure to be continually updated--and extension developed for specific industries will be available free for downloading off the Internet. Why would these organizations invest in the development of XBRL, and why would they not expect to be reimbursed for their investments by charging for the product? REAPING BENEFITS The fact is the developers will be repaid many times over, but not by charging a fee for the program; instead, they will be reimbursed by reaping its many benefits when everyone uses the same business reporting language. The most immediate benefit: Distributing financial information will be fast and easy. Further, XBRL will eliminate the need for rewrites of financial reports to accommodate incompatible accounting systems, (For more on the technical aspects of XBRL, go to www.xbrl.org, where visitors can test sample data and offer comments and suggestions for improving the program.) Additional advantages of XBRL include the following: * Fast, accurate searches. Because all the data in an XBRL-formatted file are tagged and related information is linked--say, fixed assets to balance sheet and depreciation--more than half the job of conducting a search for specific information is already done. …
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