David Bicknell
PricewaterhouseCoopers is one of the UK drivers of XBRL - the extensible business reporting language - designed to enable analysts, investors and other financial data users speed up and simplify the way in which key financial data is extracted from the Web, then downloaded into applications.
Originally driven from the US by the American Institute of Certified Public Acc-ountants, more than 30 other organisations have since joined forces to create the XML-based specification, which has just been published for review.
XBRL uses XML-based data tags to describe financial statements for both public and private companies. XBRL benefits all members of the financial information supply chain.
