The Benefits of XBRL

Good Friday afternoon to you! : )

What's a better way to start off the holiday weekend than with a little XBRL?

As usual, we were reading up on XBRL news and information this week and came across a really great article on the benefits of XBRL. Now of course we have our own reasons on how XBRL can greatly benefit business, but these are worth noting so we wanted to share.

Benefits achievable by electronic standardization of reporting:
Source: cdsb.net

• Accuracy, quality, and data integrity: XBRL will help companies reduce the number of errors in the information they report.
• Interoperability of Systems: Existing GHG accounting software does not easily exchange data. By standardizing concepts and reports (outputs), companies can refer to a common standard to transform their data so that it easily transferable between systems.
• Timeliness: Increasing pressure from clients, governments and investors will require more frequent reporting of inventory data in the future. XBRL allows companies to report inventory data with a frequency they can specify and make data available more rapidly because the time spent rekeying and verifying is decreased.
• Transparency and Comparability: XBRL is a global standard based on XML that allows for the provision of meaning by defining and making available to all the data and metadata definitions.
• Value-Add:  XBRL allows users to select specific data in order to customize reports and provide tailored information to end-users such as investors, auditors and analysts.
• Decrease Costs:  Your stakeholders use CDP’s climate change data.  The lack of a common standard considerably increases the cost of transforming and analyzing data.  E.g. error and consistency checking.  Furthermore, value chain reporting of GHG data will become increasingly important to you. Helping to drive adoption of the CCRF XBRL Taxonomy for climate change reporting is a long term vision and will streamline supply chain reporting.
• Facilitate relationships:  XBRL provides a bridge between the “subject matter” experts and the “technology experts” that is useful to accelerate the adoption of standards or heir updates.  It also makes it easier and more understandable for your stakeholders such as investors, auditors, regulators, analysts, and even reports to quickly find relevant information.

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Merrill Corporation is proud to offer XBRL Complete, a suite of services that meets - and has options to exceed – the mandated requirements for XBRL for mutual funds. For more information, please click here or call 866-367-9110.