The Securities and Exchange Commission has finally pulled back the curtain on how it wants investors and Corporate America to use XBRL, unveiling a glittering new way to read financial statements filed in the interactive data language.
Anyone can now visit the SEC’s Web site and use a prototype application known as an XBRL reader, which presents the financial reports of more than two dozen companies participating in the Commission’s XBRL pilot project. The reader checks the SEC database for new filings every night, pulls out data in those filings that has been “tagged” with XBRL labels, and then presents them in neat formats far easier to read than the text-only filings one typically must dig up from the SEC’s Edgar database.
