XBRL is becoming more important than ever
Should IT leaders expect to be hearing a lot more about XBRL? Business technology publication The Stack thinks so, and we are certainly happy to agree!
“The reporting standard XBRL is becoming more important than ever,” begins a new article. The demand for XBRL is being driven in part by financial reporting, with Inline XBRL mandates in the US and Europe. At the same time, “XBRL also remains the great hope of a growing number of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) and other sustainability professionals, who believe its application to sustainability reporting could transform an environment otherwise riddled with inconsistent, hard-to-obtain and hard-to-read sustainability reports.” An important recent example of progress in this sphere is the development of the SASB Standards XBRL Taxonomy.
At present, “narratives vary from company to company – you don’t have a P&L and a balance sheet for sustainability, unfortunately, and so makes it really hard to pull that information in and analyse it,” says S&P Global ESG president Richard Mattison, quoted in the piece. “If the information is electronically tagged, and references one or more standards, it’ll help companies reduce the burden of the amount of people asking them for this information. And it will help spread the information further and wider. When it comes to the common good, that’s probably the single thing that will help [most] with information flow… we kind of rest our hopes in reporting technologies like XBRL.”
The article also discusses XBRL International, and some of the recommendations and resources we offer, including for developers who are just getting started with XBRL, for example on using third party libraries to deal with XBRL data and metadata rather than attempting to implement the specifications from scratch. It’s a useful, business-oriented introduction to XBRL, which may pique the interest of IT professionals.
Read more here.
