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CAP Forum on E‐Business: Compromise or Customize: XBRL's Paradoxical Power
Author(s) -
COHEN ERIC E.
Publication year - 2004
Publication title -
canadian accounting perspectives
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.238
H-Index - 17
eISSN - 1911-3838
pISSN - 1499-8653
DOI - 10.1506/yahn-cae8-5cwq-h4te
Subject(s) - xbrl , business reporting , personalization , business , electronic business , set (abstract data type) , accounting , computer science , industrial organization , business model , marketing , programming language
Business reports are changing in response to regulatory and market demands. Requests by regulators for electronic filings of financial statements and tax forms are increasing and such filings are rapidly becoming mandatory in many countries. In response, extensible business reporting language (XBRL) is a market‐driven, collaborative effort to make electronic filings more useful to, and to reduce the burden on, both publishers and consumers of business reports. XBRL does much more than simply list data items that can be submitted in an electronic filing. XBRL is a complete set of tools for regulators or groups to fully communicate the meanings of and interrelationships among the business reporting concepts. In addition, core sets of concepts from regulators or groups can be extended, expanded, or otherwise modified for more specific communication by jurisdictions, industries, or individual corporations. This unique customization capability lets companies better present their electronic filings as parallels to their paper filings. A “customizable standard” offers new opportunities and new challenges. This paper discusses XBRL's paradoxical power ‐ the trade‐offs between customizing to better parallel existing paper reports and compromising to more closely match the standards, and the research needed for the transition from freeform to customized reports.