Note that this book is now obsolete, see a better source of information here. This page tells you how to get a copy of the book Financial Reporting Using XBRL. The book comes in two forms. The price of the book are simply charges by Lulu to print the book. You will also have to pay for shipping. The book is also available by chapter in PDF. You can go to this web site to grab a PDF of a any chapter(s) you might like, rather than purchasing the entire printed book. The files with examples, samples, and exercises can be downloaded here. The book is also available in Chinese. Also located on the web site above are updates and new information for chapters for which updates are available. Check back every now and then for more updates, new information is posted as it becomes available.The book is available for sale on Amazon. It is also available on CreateSpace. As a sneak peek, you can download the first two chapters under the license below (Creative Commons).
Feedback is always welcome and appreciated. Most XBRL books do not get into many technical details, because their primary audience is on the business side. While this is crucial to the growth and acceptance of XBRL as a worldwide standard for business reporting, XBRL does involve a lot of technical machinery. Software developers in contact with XBRL need to understand it in great detail. This book gets into these fine details. I (the author) am a computer scientist with a database background. The few XBRL books going into technical details mostly do so at the syntactic level of XML. Yet XBRL is semantically not XML, and learning it on a higher level of abstraction, on its own level of abstraction, helps focus on its important features, makes it easier to achiever better consistency and favors producing high-quality business reports. Minor fixes on the first edition will be made on a regular basis based on feedback ("releases"). These are only minor fixes (typo, formatting, layout, etc) that do not affect the actual content of the book.
There are currently no known issues in the second release (currently selling). You can see which release you have on the copyright page. This is a summary of the list of minor issues in the first release. They are all fixed in the current release. Find out how to access preview-only content XBRL for Interactive Data Engineering the Information Value Chain Handling Semantics in Information Exchange – An Introduction to XML Introduction to Latest XBRL Technologies Share this content on Facebook Share this content on Twitter Share this content on LinkedIn Information Systems and Communication Service Finance, Business & Banking pp 73-92XBRL: A New Tool For Electronic Financial Reporting * Final gross prices may vary according to local VAT. eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) is a computer markup language for the purpose of corporate business reporting. XBRL is based on XML, which is the universal format for structuring documents and data on the web.
In an XBRL compliant report, each financial and non-financial item is enclosed by a pair of XBRL tags, which describes the meaning of the item. These tags provide semantic information to the reports and make the financial reports not only human readable but also computer comprehensible. Leveraging the power of computers and the Internet, XBRL provides the financial community a standard to electronically and automatically prepare, publish, exchange, and extract financial statements. It is expected that XBRL will have widespread effects on financial reporting. First, preparing financial reports will be easier with XBRL. Financial information needs to be keyed into the computer only once. XBRL-ready accounting software can generate financial reports in different formats, such as for SEC filing, loan application, or corporate web reporting. It greatly reduces the manual input burden and entry errors. Second, the publication and exchange of financial reports can be facilitated. Because XBRL-compliant reports use standardized tags, the reports can be conveniently exchanged between different software and computers, independent of the software formats and computer platforms.
The financial statement users can view an XBRL report as easily as browse a web page. Third, since XBRL-compliant reports are computer comprehensible, the financial information contained in these reports can be reliably and automatically extracted through XBRL-enabled applications for financial analyses. The cost of financial analyses can be largely reduced. Decision makers, investors, creditors and other financial statement users can be alleviated from the burden of manually analyzing the financial reports. Small- and mid-sized companies will have an equal opportunity to compete with industrial giants for the capital market. XBRL is undergoing fast development. Since its inception in 1998, over 170 companies and organizations including Big 4 accounting firms, FDIC, Microsoft, and SAP have joined the XBRL consortium. XBRL will become a key standard for electronic financial reporting in the near future. XBRL: A New Tool For Electronic Financial Reporting A Perspective from Accounting and Finance