As vantagens da revolução chamada XBRL

É o poder do computador chegando ao usuário. Eis uma reportagem sobre o assunto, que defende as vantagens, mas explora as desvantagens do uso:

Financial reporting faces up to brave new world of XBRL.
JENNIFER HUGHES
Financial Times 6/12/2007 - USA Ed1 - Page 18

(...) Put simply, XBRL is a machine-readable language that tags each piece of data rather than treating it as a block of text as in a PDF or standard internet page. By breaking up the data, users will be able to order it how they want and companies should be able to provide it more quickly.(...)

In effect, all we have at the moment is electronic paper, and anyone unwilling to pay for financial statements to be put into an excel spreadsheet has probably spent a lot of mouse-clicking time copying and pasting rows and columns of numbers that invariably then need finicky re-sorting.

(...) With XBRL now becoming a reality, corporate reporting is going interactive and companies will potentially become more transparent as a result.

Yesterday, the project got a boost with the release of a greatly expanded US GAAP taxonomy, the code upon which the "language" is based.

(...) From a company point of view, it should make life easier. If all data is XBRL-ready, then compiling and sending information to different regulators, in different formats and different languages, will be simpler. There are up-front costs, but voluntary XBRL filers to the SEC, including Pepsi and GE, have said these are manageable.

(...) For the readers of financial statements, this is the equivalent of user-generated content: what you want and how you want it.

There are of course caveats. Companies have some data protection concerns, for one, particularly if information is shared between regulators. (...)