This has been coming down the pike for a while and now it’s arrived — XBRL and corporate regulatory filings. This move is a great boon for investors and anyone else who regularly reads quarterly reports and other corporate financial filings.
From the link:
The Securities and Exchange Commission is officially moving corporate regulatory filings into the Internet Age. This morning the SEC issued a rule mandating that the 500 largest public companies start to file their financial results using the interactive data tagging language known as XBRL by April 13.
XBRL tagging is said to make financial statements more searchable and comparable.
By 2010, all so-called accelerated filers, amounting to about 1,800 public companies, must comply with the new rule, and by 2011 all public companies must do so.
During their first year of filing, companies are required to use XBRL for the three primary financial statements — the income statement, the cash flow statement, and the balance sheet — as well as for footnotes to the statements, which can be presented in a “block” format. However, by the second year, footnotes must be formatted in a detailed manner.
Companies will have a bit of breathing room regarding their first submission. The SEC is allowing the first XBRL filing to be submitted 30 days after the traditional filing on the regulator’s EDGAR database system. But all subsequent financial results must be filed on EDGAR and with XBRL tagging at the same time.
