XBRL Commentary on Inifoworld

On Infoworld Jon Udell has a column from a few weeks back on XBRL, and how complex it is:

Uh-oh. I thought BPEL4WS(Business Process Execution Language for Web Services) was a brain exploder, but it's a walk in the park compared to this stuff. The XBRL spec describes how the parts of an XBRL instance interrelate, using state-of-the-art XML technologies such as XLink and XPointer. And it talks at length about the syntax and semantics of “taxonomies” that abstractly define chunks of financial reports. No sign of any actual financial data, though. And the link to a sample page at xbrl.org, returned a “404 Not Found.” I’m not surprised. The poor bloke whose job it was to produce that sample must have suffered a polymorphic recursive brain meltdown.

I've been thinking a bit about XBRL and it's applications. Essentially, XBRL is like an RSS feed that companies could make available, but sepcifically designed for financial reporting. If you have ever read an annual report (here's a link to one from Regions Bank) then you know these are chock full of metrics and numbers, and usually go into great detail about particular lines of business. For example, that annual report has breakdowns of loans by type, detail on loan losses by type by year, and details on recovered funds. The rest of the report is just as detailed, and the quarterly reports break down into quarters.

Capturing all that data makes analyst's jobs much, much easier as they can quickly get a glimpse of growth and loss in any number of areas. But it could yield some great intelligence for companies too, especially when analyzing competitors, market share changes, and performance against economic conditions. Trouble is, it is a pain to get it in a database to perform such analysis. XBRL is supposed to be the answer to that.

NASDAQ supports the standard and feeds are currently available for free for a number of companies (AIG, AMGN, BAC, C, CSCO, DELL, GE, HD, HPQ, IBM, INTC, JNJ, JPM, KO, MO, MRK, MSFT, PEP, PFE, PG, SBC, TWX, VZ, WFC, WMT, and XOM). Microsoft also provides a tool for XBRL Analysis.