XBRL to become essential to financial reporting

News Article - 27 November 2006
Category: Business

Chief executives from some of the UK's biggest financial firms have produced a statement detailing what they see to be the future of financial reporting within the accountancy profession.

Part of the statement highlights that the Global XBRL Initiative will play an integral role to enabling financial reporting, Accountancy Age reports.

The forward-looking document produced by companies including Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers and KPMG International states that users of XBRL will be able to see their company's information in different accounting systems, in any language or currency and still get answers to their questions.

"In fact the new world is already here for the approximately 40,000 companies that already use XBRL to input their data…China, Spain, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom have required companies to use XBRL," it reads.

The paper anticipates that users of the language will want to customise the information they receive and the process of recording information will in the future become as important as the ways in which data is reported today.

Earlier this year the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants announced that it would be sponsoring the international XBRL Project Committee and would help develop the language, formerly code-named XFRML.

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