The new SEC ruling has financial professionals faced with getting up to speed on XBRL quickly.

Fujitsu can help.

Join Peter Campbell, Principal Architect at Fujitsu, in an interactive session where he will focus on a practical introduction to key XBRL concepts in relation to common financial documents.

What is XBRL?

XBRL stands for eXtensible Business Reporting Language, and it is a language for the electronic communication of business and financial data worldwide. As one of the family of "XML" languages, it is becoming a standard means of communicating information between businesses and on the internet.

XBRL is being developed by an international non-profit consortium of approximately 450 major companies, organisations and government agencies. It is an open standard, free of licence fees. It is already being put to practical use in a number of countries and implementations of XBRL are growing rapidly around the world. (Source: http://www.xbrl.org/)

Providing major benefits in the preparation, analysis and communication of business information, XBRL offers cost savings, greater efficiency, and improved accuracy and reliability to all those involved in supplying or using financial data.

What is XBRL?

The short answer is that XBRL (short for eXtensible Business Reporting Language) is an XML-based standard for handling corporate financial information.

For a more complete definition I'll leave it to the experts. From XBRL International's website:

XBRL (Extensible Business Reporting Language) is an electronic format for simplifying the flow of financial statements, performance reports, accounting records, and other financial information between software programs. This royalty-free, open specification is being developed collaboratively to make it less costly for companies to publish financial information in a format that can be easily viewed and used by management, investors, regulators, and all of the participants in financial markets. It is an XML-based framework that provides the financial community a standards-based method to prepare, publish in a variety of formats, reliably extract and automatically exchange the financial statements of public and private companies, public sector agencies. XBRL enhances the usability and transparency of financial information reported under existing accounting standards, simplifies disclosure, and allows companies to communicate financial information more readily via the Internet.

In simple terms, XBRL is trying build upon the foundation that XML provides for data manipulation, specifically for those dealing with financial data. It is designed to provide a platform-independent way of describing, transferring, and utilizing financial information.

Short introduction to XBRL

This Vendor website contains introductions to both XBRL and SBR.  The following introductory information is provided:

What is XBRL?

What is SBR?

XML Position Paper for Tax Administrations

Reducing the burden of compliance through standardization

Red Tape Reduction Commission's Efforts Timely

Why Do We Need SBR in Canada?