XBRL And The Development Of Our Financial Systems
XBRL is an acronym for eXtensible Business Reporting Language, which is a free and open electronic global standard language format on the internet. It is valuable for communicating data electronically. Thus companies who deal with financial data find this format more practical, more efficient and less costly for the purposes of communicating information amongst each other and over the internet.
The Significance Of XBRL For Businesses
The difference between this and other formats like the Portable Document Format (PDF) is the use of identifying tags within a document. Instead of reading the page as a whole, computer systems now have the ability to individualize the data. Thus, the software itself is able to process any data that is sent using this format. Analyzing, storing, selecting, comparing and data re-entry now become automated. With this in place, the communications process just becomes more dependable and less prone to mistakes.
It has been adopted by most financial institutions nowadays due to these characteristics. It helps speed up tasks for financial managers, investors, regulators and analysts. Examples of big institutions that make use of the said language include statistics agencies, tax-filing agencies, stock market regulators, banking regulators and business registrars.
XBRL in Singapore
Worldwide acceptance of this format is not surprising. Aside from Singapore, Other nations that are already implementing it include Japan, Korea, Australia, Thailand and China. Since 2007, Singapore incorporated companies need to submit business and financial papers in the XBRL format. Only a few companies who are exempted from this can still file in the usual PDF format.
Due to the specialized and time consuming work that this entails, most business companies now opt to outsource the task. Fortunately, there are firms that offer this corporate secretarial duty. You may choose to find yourself an entity that has the necessary know-how in this electronic business language. You can look at those that offer business consultancy, taxation, accounting, auditing, IPO consulting, corporate secretarial and other related services tasks.
