Over the past few years there has been a buzz growing about interactive data. If this topic is a mystery to you, let AFPI help you understand more about the subject and its underlying technology known as eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL).
As a leader in corporate communications and customized compliance solutions, AFPI can help you successfully implement XBRL into your organization in 3 easy steps:
Get Educated
What is XBRL? Simply put, XBRL is a data tagging system developed to enhance the financial reporting process and make data more useful for investors. XBRL streamlines the process for collecting, reporting, and sharing financial information between companies and end users over the Internet.
How it works. XBRL creates a map or structure for a company’s financial information by adding specific identifier tags to each piece of financial data as dictated through standard taxonomies and through company custom extensions. The result of this process is an instance document. An instance document is a complete set of financial statements tagged with identification codes that can now be repurposed or rendered into a document ready to be filed via EDGAR, used for printing purposes, or used for posting to a company’s website.
Make Decisions
Identify a team. To successfully implement XBRL, identify a team responsible for managing the project and determine the roles of each team member. Assemble individuals from your accounting, finance, IT, and legal departments to provide a balance amongst the team and ensure that you are aligning your initiative with your company’s goals.
Determine level of implementation. Moving forward, you will have a few decisions to make which will ultimately determine how you will approach the implementation of XBRL into your organization. First, you will need to consider the level of detail at which implementation will occur. Integrating XBRL into your general ledger will have a different, and more detailed, project outline than just incorporating it into your regulatory filings.
Determine who will tag your documents. Now you can determine who will be responsible for tagging the data. There are XBRL software packages commercially available and easy to use. While tagging your own documents will provide you with the greatest understanding of XBRL, your project team should identify if you have sufficient internal resources available to manage the self-tagging approach. An alternative to this is to outsource the tagging of documents to a third party vendor such as AFPI.
AFPI can prepare and generate all of the instance documents and associated linkbases needed for successfully filing your documents with the SEC. If you tag your own documents, AFPI can accept and validate your published files while building and creating an EDGAR submission.
