XBRL (Extensible Business Reporting Language) is a freely available global framework for exchanging business information. XBRL allows the expression of semantics commonly required in business reporting. The standard was originally based on XML, but now supports reports in JSON and CSV formats in addition to the original XML-based syntax. XBRL is also increasingly used in its Inline XBRL variant, which embeds XBRL tags into an HTML document. One common use of XBRL is the exchange of financial information, such as in a company's annual financial report. The XBRL standard is developed and published by XBRL International, Inc. (XII).
XBRL is a standards-based way to communicate and exchange business information between business systems. These communications are defined by metadata set out in taxonomies, which capture the definition of individual reporting concepts as well as the relationships between concepts and other semantic meaning. Information being communicated or exchanged is provided within an XBRL instance.
Early users of XBRL included regulators such as the U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Committee of European Banking Supervisors (CEBS). Common functions in many countries that make use of XBRL include regulators of stock exchanges and securities, banking regulators, business registrars, revenue reporting and tax-filing agencies, and national statistical agencies.
A list of known XBRL projects is published by XBRL International. Starting in the late 2000s, agencies such as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the United Kingdom's HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC), and Singapore's Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority (ACRA), began to require companies to use it, and other regulators followed suit.Regulators are serious about universal financial language Financial Times 8-Dec-2010 Development of the SEC's initial US GAAP Taxonomy was led by XBRL US and was accepted and deployed for use by public companies in 2008 in phases, with the largest filers going first: foreign companies which use International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) are expected to submit their financial returns to the SEC using XBRL once the IFRS taxonomy has been accepted by the SEC. In the UK in 2011, both HMRC and Companies House accepted XBRL in the iXBRL format. XBRL was adopted by the Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA) of India for filing financial and costing information with the Central Government.
Specification The current version of the base XBRL specification is 2.1, with errata corrections.
The current version of the Inline XBRL specification is 1.1
Conformance suites are available to test processors of XBRL and Inline XBRL documents.
XBRL document structure In typical usage, XBRL consists of an XBRL instance, containing primarily the business facts being reported, and a collection of taxonomies (called a Discoverable Taxonomy Set (DTS)), which define metadata about these facts, such as what the facts mean and how they relate to one another. XBRL uses XML Schema, XLink, and XPointer standards.
XBRL Instance The XBRL instance begins with the <xbrl> root element. There may be more than one XBRL instance embedded in a larger XML document. Xbrl Instance is also known as XBRL file. The XBRL instance itself holds the following information: Business Facts – facts can be divided into two categories Items are facts holding a single value. They are represented by a single XML element with the value as its content. Tuples are facts holding multiple values. They are represented by a single XML element containing nested Items or Tuples. In the design of XBRL, all Item facts must be assigned a context. Contexts define the entity, e.g., company or individual, to which the fact applies, the period of time the fact is relevant, and an optional scenario. Date and time information appearing in the period element must conform to ISO 8601. Scenarios provide further contextual information about the facts, such as whether the business values reported are actual, projected, or budgeted. Units define the units used by numeric or fractional facts within the document, such as USD, shares. XBRL allows more complex units to be defined if necessary. Facts of a monetary nature must use a unit from the ISO 4217 namespace. Footnotes use XLink to associate one or more facts with some content. References to XBRL taxonomies, typically through schema references. It is also possible to link directly to a linkbase.
This is an example of a fictitious Dutch company's International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) statement instance file : <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xbrli:xbrl xmlns:ifrs-gp="http://xbrl.iasb.org/int/fr/ifrs/gp/2005-05-15" xmlns:iso4217="http://www.xbrl.org/2003/iso4217" xmlns:xbrli="http://www.xbrl.org/2003/instance" xmlns:xbrll="http://www.xbrl.org/2003/linkbase" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">
<xbrll:schemaRef xlink:href="http://www.org.com/xbrl/taxonomy" xlink:type="simple"/> <ifrs-gp:OtherOperatingIncomeTotalFinancialInstitutions contextRef="J2004" decimals="0" unitRef="EUR">38679000000</ifrs-gp:OtherOperatingIncomeTotalFinancialInstitutions> <ifrs-gp:OtherAdministrativeExpenses contextRef="J2004" decimals="0" unitRef="EUR">35996000000</ifrs-gp:OtherAdministrativeExpenses> <ifrs-gp:OtherOperatingExpenses contextRef="J2004" decimals="0" unitRef="EUR">870000000</ifrs-gp:OtherOperatingExpenses> ... <ifrs-gp:OtherOperatingIncomeTotalByNature contextRef="J2004" decimals="0" unitRef="EUR">10430000000</ifrs-gp:OtherOperatingIncomeTotalByNature> <xbrli:context id="BJ2004"> <xbrli:entity> <xbrli:identifier scheme="www.iqinfo.com/xbrl">ACME</xbrli:identifier> </xbrli:entity> <xbrli:period> <xbrli:instant>2004-01-01</xbrli:instant> </xbrli:period> </xbrli:context> <xbrli:context id="EJ2004"> <xbrli:entity> <xbrli:identifier scheme="www.iqinfo.com/xbrl">ACME</xbrli:identifier> </xbrli:entity> <xbrli:period> <xbrli:instant>2004-12-31</xbrli:instant> </xbrli:period> </xbrli:context> <xbrli:context id="J2004"> <xbrli:entity> <xbrli:identifier scheme="www.iqinfo.com/xbrl">ACME</xbrli:identifier> </xbrli:entity> <xbrli:period> <xbrli:startDate>2004-01-01</xbrli:startDate> <xbrli:endDate>2004-12-31</xbrli:endDate> </xbrli:period> </xbrli:context> <xbrli:unit id="EUR"> <xbrli:measure>iso4217:EUR</xbrli:measure> </xbrli:unit> </xbrli:xbrl>
XBRL Taxonomy An XBRL Taxonomy is a collection of taxonomy schemas and linkbases. A taxonomy schema is an XML schema document (file). Linkbases are XML documents (file) which follow the XLink specification. The schema must ultimately extend the XBRL instance schema document and typically extend other published XBRL schemas on the xbrl.org website.
Taxonomy schemas define Item and Tuple "concepts" using <xsd:element> elements. Concepts provide names for the fact and indicate whether or not it is a tuple or an item, the data type (such as monetary, numeric, fractional, or textual), and potentially more metadata. Items and Tuples can be regarded as "implementations" of concepts, or specific instances of a concept. A good analogy for those familiar with object oriented programming would be that Concepts are the classes and Items and Tuples are Object instances of those classes. This is the source of the use of the "XBRL instance" terminology. In addition to defining concepts, taxonomy schemas reference linkbase documents. Tuples instances are 1..n relationships with their parents; their metadata is simply the collection of their attributes. Linkbases are a collection of Links, which themselves are a collection of locators, arcs, and potentially resources. Locators are elements that essentially reference a concept and provide an arbitrary label for it. In turn, arcs are elements indicating that a concept links to another concept by referencing the labels defined by the locators. Some arcs link concepts to other concepts. Other arcs link concepts to resources, the most common of which are human-readable labels for the concepts. The XBRL 2.1 specification defines five different kinds of linkbases. Label Linkbase Reference Linkbase Calculation Linkbase Definition Linkbase Presentation Linkbase
Label Linkbase This linkbase provides human readable strings for concepts. Using the label linkbase, multiple languages can be supported, as well as multiple strings within each language.
XBRL aims to become a worldwide standard for electronic business reporting. This requires taxonomies to present business data in many different languages. Therefore, it is important to be able to create an element that is assigned with labels for different languages. There may also be different labels for different purposes. All labels are stored and linked to the elements in a label linkbase. Elements defined in a schema are built to convey accounting meaning to computers. In order to make it easier for computers to process their names, they have to obey some rules. For example, the use of spaces is not allowed so 'Cash and Cash Equivalents' would be named 'CashAndCashEquivalents' . Additionally, big taxonomies such as IFRS obey specific rules of naming and labelling to ensure consistency within the schema. For example, there could be a list of words that are excluded from the names, e.g., :and:, "of" ..., or words that appear only in a particular order (i.e., 'Net' or 'Total' at the end of the label after a comma). In the label linkbase, elements are connected to human readable labels using "concept-label" arcrole. As mentioned above, elements can be assigned to labels in different languages. An example that describes definitions of labels of the IFRS element AssetsTotal in English, German and Polish is provided below. <label xlink:type="resource" xlink:role="http://www.xbrl.org/2003/role/label" xlink:label="ifrs_AssetsTotal_lbl" xml:lang="en">Assets, Total</label>
<label xlink:type="resource" xlink:role="http://www.xbrl.org/2003/role/label" xlink:label="ifrs_AssetsTotal_lbl" xml:lang="de">Vermögenswerte, Gesamt</label>
<label xlink:type="resource" xlink:role="http://www.xbrl.org/2003/role/label" xlink:label="ifrs_AssetsTotal_lbl" xml:lang="pl">Aktywa, Razem</label>
To distinguish between languages, XBRL uses the XML attribute lang. Taxonomy creators may also define different labels for one element. One of the ideas of XBRL is that the information about the period and currency for which the element is reported is not contained within an element definition but is described by a context in instance documents. In financial reporting on the other hand, many terms express the date for which they are being reported, for instance Property, Plant and Equipment at the beginning of year and Property, Plant and Equipment at the end of year. XBRL allows the creation of different labels depending on the context in which an element will be used. <label xlink:type="resource" xlink:role="http://www.xbrl.org/2003/role/label" xlink:label="ifrs_AssetsTotal_lbl" xml:lang="en">Property, Plant and Equipment, Net</label>
<label xlink:type="resource" xlink:role="http://www.xbrl.org/2003/role/periodStartLabel" xlink:label="ifrs_AssetsTotal_lbl" xml:lang="en">Property, Plant and Equipment, Net, Beginning Balance</label>
<label xlink:type="resource" xlink:role="http://www.xbrl.org/2003/role/periodEndLabel" xlink:label="ifrs_AssetsTotal_lbl" xml:lang="en">Property, Plant and Equipment, Net, Ending Balance</label> The example above shows how three different labels are assigned to one element by applying different role attributes on labels.
Reference Linkbase This linkbase associates concepts with citations of some body of authoritative literature.
Financial concepts appearing on business reports more often than not stem from regulatory documents issued by authorities. For example, the IFRS Taxonomy describes financial reports prepared based on IFRSs (Bound Volume).