FASB fact sheet brings XBRL into focus
The US Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) has produced a new fact sheet in its ‘FASB in Focus’ series, titled ‘XBRL: What is it? Why the FASB? Who uses it?.’ It’s a great introduction to XBRL and digital reporting, particularly from the US perspective.
The fact sheet explains what XBRL is, how it’s used in the ‘US GAAP Taxonomy’ (made up of the GAAP Financial Reporting Taxonomy and SEC Reporting Taxonomy, used to tag financial reports to make them machine readable and comparable), and FASB’s responsibility for developing and updating the taxonomy.
It concludes by looking at who uses XBRL and how, noting that “the availability of XBRL data has helped users go deeper in their financial analysis, view and collect financial data, perform peer comparisons, review cross-sectional or time series data for patterns or variances, update forecasts with as-reported information, and more.”It offers the remarkable statistic that “machines represent over 95% of EDGAR ‘visitors’ enabling a wide range of XBRL data users, including investors, financial analysts, economic research firms, data aggregators, academic researchers, college professors, preparers for peer analysis, auditors, the SEC, FDIC, IRS, and other federal agencies, as well as the FASB.”
Read it here.
