XBRL and Financial Statement Preparation

I wrote an article for CFO Connect about the use of (eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) in the preparation of financial statements rather than just for their dissemination and analysis. Scanned image is available here.

Financial analysts have begun to love XBRL and the US SEC is also now pushing companies to use XBRL in their Edgar filings. Companies however tend to think of this as another investor relations expense rather than as a productivity tool for themselves as preparers of financial statements. I argue on the other hand that it is high time that we got rid of all those spreadsheets and word processor files and used XBRL to automate the process completely and integrate it completely with the corporate ERP systems. This would improve reliability, increase speed and reduce manual interventions.

Posted at 2:19 pm IST on Tue, 7 Nov 2006         permanent link

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