XBRL AN OVERVIEW

WHAT IS XBRL

• XBRL is an electronic language, a royalty-free open specification developed by XBRL International Inc., a not-for-profit consortium of 500 leading companies and agencies from around the world. The organizations of XBRL International are driving XBRL adoption to ensure greater transparency, efficiency, and agility in business reporting.
• XBRL, an XML based language, is used to express business-reporting content. It facilitates the automatic exchange and reliable extraction of business information across diverse software applications.

XBRL – KEY TERMS

Schema:

• XBRL Schema stores information about taxonomy elements
•  The purpose of XBRL schemas is to define financial and accounting concepts in system understandable manner.
• schemaRef :http://www.mca.gov.in/XBRL/2011/08/27/Taxonomy/CnI/ci/in-gaap-ci-2011-03-31.xsd"

Tags:

• Machine-readable items that gives a standard definition for each line item in financial statements
• Tags are of two types
• Element (Where value can be attached)
• Abstract (bind concepts in a hierarchical manner in the taxonomy)

Attributes:

The properties of the tag are called the attributes .
eg.Data Type, Period Tpe,Documentation, standard label etc

Data type attribute:

• monetaryItem Type
• sharesItem Type
• stringItem Type
• PerShareItem Type
• percentItem Type
• PureItem Type
• decimalItem Type
• Text blockItem Type
• DateItem Type
• Integer Item Type

Contexts:

The reporting period or date which could be either:Instant(for a particluar date) or Duration (for a particular period).

Concept: 

These are the elements in the taxonomy. These are of two types

• Item: Item is an element used to define a concept which will hold single value in the given period.
• Tuple: Concepts which can have multiple values for the same period or if elements are required together to make the information more meaningful and complete E.g. Subsidiary information – there would be multiple values for name, shares held for any given period.

Fact:

The values included in the instance document, which correspond to the concepts included in the taxonomy, are called as facts

	Concept	Fact	Data Type	Balance	Context
1	Fixed Assets	1000	Monetary Item	Debit	Instant
2	Current liabilities	5000	Monetary Item	Credit	Instant
3	Revenues	275000	Monetary Item	Credit	Duration
4	Name of the Director	XYZ	String item	NA	Instant
5	Date of Board meeting	19-8-2011	Date item	NA	Instant

Linkbase:

XBRL linkbases and XBRL Schemas define together XBRL taxonomy. Schema defines the core elements and its characteristics, while the purpose of XBRL linkbases is to combine labels and references to the concepts as well as define relationships between those concepts. There are various types of linkbases different kinds of linkbases and each has a special purpose

• Presentation linkbase
• Calculation linkbase
• Definition linkbase
• Label linkbase
• Reference linkbase
• Formula linkbase

CURRENT MCA FILING & DISADVANTAGES

• Form 23AC & 23ACA
• Scanned Copy of Financials as attachments
• Not readable in many cases
• Not comparable
• Difficult for Users of financial information to get data
• Financial reports not standardized
• Submitted in various forms like word, excel ,PDF, HTML etc
• Analysis is difficult
• Grouping of items by different companies are different ,hence comparison becomes difficult
• Finding particular data for different companies becomes difficult as data are not standardized

ADVANTAGES OF XBRL

• Readability
• Standardisation
• Analysis and comparison becomes easy
• Information tracking becomes easy for users
• Can be converted into any languages
• Data validation
• You tell your story your way
• Ease of storage, generation and transmission
• Reduces errors - information can be transferred without being manually recaptured
• Lower cost to acquire information -through the use of computer extraction without the need for translation or manual checking

LIST OF COUNTRIES THAT HAVE ALREADY ADOPTED XBRL

• Mandatory:France, China,Spain,Israel,Japan,US,Belgium,Germany,Singapore,UK
• Optional:Australia, South Korea, Sweden, Canada

 

XBRL IN INDIA

• IRDA-Development Stage
• MCA-Mandatory Stage
• ICAI-Development Stage
• NSE-Voluntary Filings
• RBI-Mandatory Filings
• BSE- Voluntary Filings
• SEBI- Voluntary Filings
• CERC- Development Stage