Group develops standard business language

A year-old consortium named XBRL.org is developing a standard for the online preparation and exchange of business reports and financial data.

The group has representatives from 55 global companies and is trying to enroll more. Microsoft, KPMG, J.P. Morgan, Fidelity Investments, and Morgan Stanley Dean Witter are members, and several others are considering using the consortium's standard, eXtensible Business Reporting Language, for some projects.

XBRL.org expects to have 100 international members by the end of the year and to formally launch of its standard in Canada, the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand, and Taiwan, by year end.

More than 100 executives registered for XBRL's symposium in New York on September 13th, ranging from Primark to the Federal Reserve.

It had a formal launch in Germany at the end of September sponsored by Deutsche Bundesbank and the consortium will host a symposium in London on November 8th in association with the Institute of Chartered Accountants for England and Wales.

XBRL.org's initial goal is to provide a new framework - based on the eXtensible Markup Language, or XML - that businesses would use to create, exchange, and analyse financial reporting information, including regulatory filings, general ledger information, and audit schedules.

The XBRL standard is an open one, and the consortium that created it aims to simplify the reading of 10K and 10Q filings, cashflow statements, income statements, and balance sheets by putting the relevant data into readable spreadsheets.

The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants spearheaded the formation of XBRL.org.

Member representatives have been meeting once a month for two days at a time since September 1999 to build the framework.

Christy Reichhelm, B2B (business-to-business) enterprise applications industry manager at Microsoft and the software giant's representative in the consortium, said XBRL.org is "bringing together the accounting, software, and financial services industries around the world to build an eXtensible Markup Language framework to transmit financial and business reporting data over the Internet".

The group delivered the first beta of the framework on April 6th and version 1.0 on July 31st. The specification can be downloaded from www.xbrl.org. "We're one of the first consortia to create an XML language standard and to deliver on it," Ms Reichhelm said.

Mr Zachary Coffin, XBRL liaison chairman and program leader of the digital media institute at KPMG Consulting LLC in Los Angeles, has recently been giving presentations about XBRL to companies in Europe and Asia. The consortium has also briefed US government agencies, like the Department of Defence about putting the language in place.

"XBRL will make it easier for companies to get the attention they deserve from capital markets, and easier for creditors and investors to identify true business performers," Mr Coffin said. "Unite these two communities with XBRL, and you have the most significant development in financial reporting since the birth of the Internet."

The consortium has seven subgroups that each target about 10 industries.

"Within a one- to two-year time frame, we hope companies will be reporting their financials in XBRL," Ms Reichhelm said. "We're trying to create one way to standardise as to create a document once and render it in lots of formats. We're trying to make the hunting and gathering of data easier and more accurate."

Mr Coffin said the consortium's other priorities are to get new members, hook up with other Internet initiatives and alliances, such as the W3 consortium, and to get all industries to use XBRL.

Elmer Huh, an accounting analyst at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter and chairman of the international domain user group within XBRL.org's steering committee, said that while the consortium's focus right now is on financial statements, the language will eventually be extended to credit processing and loan approval-type reporting. "This is the next step in applying XML to applications tailored to a specific purpose, industry, or sector," he added.

He said XBRL will help companies save money and make it easier both for the investment community to carry out timelier analysis and for the reporting community to lower the cost capital risk associated with companies reporting results.