On May 14^th 2008 the Security And Exchange Commission issued a proposed rule to gradually mandate the use of XBRL (Extensible Business Reporting Language) in the United States from the end of 2008. This is a significant milestone in the global trend of XBRL adoption, even though not the only or the first one: millions of companies worldwide are already reporting their financial data in XBRL today.

Still, the use of XBRL for financial reporting is only the tip of the iceberg. Its real value proposition for companies is not as yet another format to generate external reports and to fulfill regulatory mandates. XBRL enables dramatic cost reductions in crucial corporate processes like data integration, business intelligence, internal and external auditing, IFRS convergence.

Visit our XBRL GL Use Cases page to learn how XBRL Global Ledger and XBRL for financial reporting can help your company achieve those cost reductions while getting ready to fulfill your regulatory reporting requirements.

Then, check out our Get Started page for an overview of how to implement XBRL in your organization today, and see live examples of what a standards-based approach enables in terms of data access and data transformation.

Finally, try the Convergence Assistant, a web based application that supports IFRS convergence as well as any process where reconciliation of end reporting with the underlying data is key.