ZapNote: The Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL)
Sharing financial and business information within and external to a business is often a challenge. Preparing financial statements for filing, printing, or web display often means that this same information would need to be re-entered multiple times. Furthermore, once this information is published, searching and extracting components of the financial information can be a challenge. The Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) is an open, freely licensed specification that uses XML to describe financial statements for both public and private companies. The format provides a standard format in which users can prepare business and financial reports that can be subsequently presented in a variety of ways.