How can companies benefit from adopting XBRL

XBRL increases the usability of financial statement information.  The need to re-key financial data for analytical and other purposes can be eliminated.  By presenting its statements in XBRL, a company can benefit investors and raise its profile.  It will also meet the requirements of regulators, lenders and others consumers of financial information, who are increasingly demanding reporting in XBRL.  This will improve business relations and lead to a range of benefits.


With full adoption of XBRL, companies can automate data collection. For example, data from different company divisions with different accounting systems can be assembled quickly, cheaply and efficiently.  Once data is gathered in XBRL, different types of reports using varying subsets of the data can be produced with minimum effort.  A company finance division, for example, could quickly and reliably generate internal management reports, financial statements for publication, tax and other regulatory filings, as well as credit reports for lenders.  Not only can data handling be automated, removing time-consuming, error-prone processes, but the data can be checked by software for accuracy.