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The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) proposal to require publicly held companies to file financial statements using eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) is coming to fruition quickly. During a recent speech, the SEC's chief accountant, Conrad Hewitt, said he expects the full commission to vote on the final rule by the end of 2008.



In the SEC's current proposal, the largest companies must "tag" the main part of financial statements using XBRL for periods ending on or after Dec. 15, 2008, while all other public companies have a lag time of one to two years. At this point, XBRL compliance calls for companies to tag financial statement data with a finance-specific set of codes for filings in the initial year. In the following year, detailed footnote elements also will need to be tagged.

The easiest way for public companies to implement XBRL is to outsource the tagging to their current financial statement publisher. Outsourcing XBRL, however, simply increases a company's cost of compliance, while in-sourcing enables it to meet the SEC requirements and experiment with the technology to generate additional business benefits that could pay for the compliance effort.

Instead of increasing reliance on spreadsheets or expanding technology infrastructure to move data and generate reports, XBRL leverages simple Web-based technologies to build a single source of contextualized data that can automatically identify, locate and sort specific financial information. Often, client and business information is spread across various applications in the enterprise, fragmenting management's view of customer and other business-related data and forcing users to move data between multiple applications, databases and spreadsheets. According to the research firm Gartner, Inc., based in Stamford, Conn., XBRL can enhance both internal and external reporting when it is implemented beyond reporting disclosure and used to integrate financial data across all business applications and segments.

Crunching the numbers: a financial value scenario

Companies can enhance reporting without making a significant incremental investment in technology infrastructure by leveraging an in-house XBRL effort. Most stand-alone XBRL tools are relatively inexpensive. They include features that support compliance and incorporate reporting tools to provide better access to the data. XBRL is not a silver bullet, but it can augment the financial closing and reporting process and other projects, such as a move to a single-instance enterprise resource planning software system or data warehouse.

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