Xbrl

[Taresa]

Has anyone used XBRL at all?

[dsch]

I guess you mean this (http://www.xbrl.org/)? Haven' used it through.

[Taresa]

That's the one :) I'm trying to get my school to buy DragonTag so I can mess around with it. Free trials always run out before I really get a chance to mess with stuff!

Anyone into finance/consulting should be pretty into it. The SEC officially "recommends" it now.

[dsch]

Have never heard of it here in Denmark :) (but new technologies are a little slow to show up here) What is DragonTag? And what are the great parts about XBRL in general? Just curious :)

[Taresa]

WELL! Let me bore... er, TELL you :D

Financial statements in general are made using Microsoft Excel. Financial analysts have worksheets set up so that they dump in numbers that accounting gives them, and Excel plops out an official Balance Sheet, Income Statement, and Statement of Changes in Cash Flows.

This information is difficult to work with and generally not easily consolidated when other financial analysts, and users of financial statements, want to get at it.

XBRL gives a name to "depreciation expense" so that the data can be handled intelligently and spooted out different ways, on different platforms, for different purposes. It does for those stoic financial statements what XML did for HTML elements.

At least, that's what I gather from my research over the past couple days.

Do you guys in Denmark do financial reporting for the EU financial markets? I thought you did.

XBRL is recognized not only by the SEC in the US, but also by different regulatory agencies around the world. It makes it much easier for financial information to be compared across accounting standards, across currencies, etc.

[dsch]

Thanks for the explanation Taresa :) Well, do you mean if companies do financial reporting for the EU financial market? And is it for or to? If to, no. But the government has to, I assume. There is reportings for/about the EU financial market. But I haven't much knowledge about this, so please don't take my words for facts here :) I could easily be wrong :o

[Taresa]

Here in the U.S. any company with shareholders trading shares in financial markets has to submit quarterly and annual financial statements. The EU has pretty intense standards for financial reporting for their markets, but most European countries seem to handle it fine. Japan and the US needed extensions this year to come up to compliance. Some companies opt out of certain financial markets because of the cost of reporting.

Interesting stuff... to me at least :)