XBRL still a foreign language for advisers

The use of XBRL continues to grow in the financial services industry and among its regulators, but it isn't a part of financial advisers' worlds — yet. That's the general theme that came out of a conference held last week by XBRL US, a nonprofit consortium that is a proponent of XML business reporting. While the extensible business reporting language data standard has been around for a decade, day-to-day usage by most financial advisers remains low. Investment managers and analysts, on the other hand, are already using the reporting language for research. Indeed, XBRL could have a big impact on the exchange and analysis of business data and financial statements. The conference, “XBRL Financial Reporting: Advancing Transparency, Transforming the Dialogue,” the event brought together financial executives, analysts, investor relations professionals and service providers. It covered a range of topics. Some of the hotter discussions: lessons learned from the Securities and Exchange Commission's XBRL mandate for U.S. GAAP reporting, and how public companies can use XBRL for their own analysis. A secondary theme was how XBRL, which is intended to be the lingua franca of business data, will factor into corporate actions, internal reporting and government reporting. For those in need of some over-simplified context: Hypertext markup language, or HTML, is the language used to build most static Web pages. It can define the order, font, color and other aspects of how text or other elements are displayed on a Web page. XML is a language used to define specific pieces of data. XBRL tags are used for even finer precision, providing standards-based, agreed upon definitions for specific pieces of business data, such as cash flow or revenue. Following the conference, XBRL US has made a number of resources and presentations available: Conference presentations A series of articles on XBRL for public companies and analysts Links to three-minute podcasts about individual conference sessions For additional information visit the XBRL US main page.