The benefits of XBRL are well-documented: the language is vastly improving financial reporting and auditing by slashing time, cost and inefficiencies. But it’s no secret that creating an XBRL report requires an in-depth understanding of the XBRL specification—something that could ultimately impede the user community from reaping the full benefits the language has to offer.
What’s more, constructing XBRL taxonomies can be costly for software developers as they create new XBRL dialects with more and more features. XBRL can also be a financial burden to businesses, which incur steep consulting fees and additional development costs as they implement XBRL and try to keep up with different dialects.
But there is a better way. It’s called Extensible Business Reporting Language – Simple, or XBRLS. This approach greatly improves the usability of XBRL and enables the non-technical business user to create XBRL reports in a simple and convenient manner—without the need for expensive consultants and years of training.
A dialect of XBRL, XBRLS is 100 percent XBRL compliant. It promises to lower the level of expertise needed to operate the system, allowing any businessperson to comply with filing requirements using XBRL.
The premise behind XBRLS is simplicity itself. By sacrificing some of the system’s flexibility (i.e. complexity), but none of its features, XBRL suddenly becomes accessible to a much broader business audience. Essentially, XBRLS masks the complexity of XBRL, exposing only as much as the average business user needs.
How is this achieved? After years of research, leading XBRL experts have identified a number of basic data patterns that recur in financial statements. These patterns are all that is needed to report information in financial statements. By adhering to this relatively small set of XBRLS patterns, any accountant can—after only some very basic training—create SEC-compliant financial reports in XBRL.
XBRLS features a combination of formalized best practices, operating procedures and support tools that simplify the use of XBRL for business reporting. It also makes it easier for more XBRL tools and business applications to enter the market, ultimately lowering the cost and increasing the performance of internal and external reporting. With XBRLS, everyone stands to gain.
To learn more about XBRLS, please see the following documents:
- XBRLS: How a Simpler XBRL Can Make a Better XBRL.
- XBRLS Meta Patterns (working prototype).
- XBRLS Patterns Guide.
- XBRLS Comprehensive Prototype. (Coming soon!)
