XBRL

XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) is a technology standard that is applied in the creation of financial statement data and other reporting situations. XBRL has gained significant momentum in recent years with the call for governance of financial reporting and its visibility by the public. This momentum, or concerted effort - if you will - has provided the public with more knowledge of their investments, whether they be exploratory or vested. The end result of this standard has optimized the method of financial data authoring, managing and reporting by publicly traded corporations.

Financial Reporting Issues

Optimizing the method that authors use to report this data is key. Given the current circumstances, it is not surprising that vital data is lost in "financial catacombs," void of any structure, order, rhyme or reason. Challenges that corporations face can be broken down into the following issues:

• Financial data is manually entered from multiple sources.
• Analyzing data is often time-consuming and costly as it is stored across an enterprise in various formats.
• Retrieving financial data is difficult due to multiple formats and unstructured authoring.
• Reporting financial data is hindered by lack of automation.
• Validating financial data is nearly impossible due to lack of re-use of content from original source in comparison to finalized document.

Author

XBRL standardizes the authoring process by providing taxonomy and structured elements, which masks the technical complexities often associated with automated authoring environments. XBRL gives corporations the ability to create templates for authoring data that can be spread throughout a company, providing increased methods for collaboration and creating a familiar structure for consistent authoring.

XBRL is an international standard and because it's based in XML, XBRL-compliant data can be pulled directly from a centralized repository, without further format processing. This provides an efficient method to re-use financial data across an enterprise.

Financial reports such quarterly (10Q) and annual (10K) earnings reports can be shared dynamically using XBRL, empowering financial analysts with the tools they need to optimize their work flow.

XBRL Viewing

Along with authoring, editing and validating XBRL data, companies are now focusing on improved methods to publish this data. Dakota Systems has provided customized viewing, or publishing solutions for all formats and across multiple mediums including the internet, PDF, and mobile devices (Blackberry, iPhone, etc.). Trust your XBRL publishing effort to Dakota Systems' customized publishing technologies.

Partners

Dakota Systems has long believed that providing solutions for finance not only incorporates multiple strategies, but also can bring together multiple partners. Validating and editing XBRL documents can be made easy with built-in XBRL tools in Altova's XMLSpy. As a premier partner of Altova, Dakota Systems is in a perfect position to help any company integrate Altova XMLSpy on an enterprise level, along with customizing its' interface for efficient editing and validating of XBRL data.