A Tour of Five XBRL Tools: Products That Help Make Tagged Data Work for You and Your Clients

Supporters of extensible business reporting language (XBRL) have long touted its potential to transform financial data mining and analysis. Now that potential is starting to become a reality, thanks to several new software applications. These tools are designed to help accountants, investors, and analysts extract data from XBRL documents for use in familiar software applications such as Microsoft Excel. This is a major development in the evolution of XBRL, which to this point has focused on companies learning to apply XBRL "tags" to label the myriad pieces of information in financial reports. The SEC spurred this process by instituting a requirement that all publicly traded companies in the United States file their financial reports using XBRL. The SEC phased in the requirement over several years. The complexity and sheer number of XBRL tags made the process laborious and resulted in a plethora of errors in early XBRL filings. Since completion of the SEC phase-in, companies continue to reduce the XBRL-tagging errors in their filings. XBRL markup rules allow a motivated individual to identify the concepts presented in an instance document, but the tags, attributes, and values are designed to interact with computers using XBRL-aware software. In other words, the true power of XBRL-tagged data is that computer programs can locate and use specific items of financial information without human help. SOFTWARE TOOLS A wide range of software packages (e.g., web browsers, word processors, and XML development tools) can open an XBRL document, but many simply display the XBRL tags. Microsoft Excel and Access (and other spreadsheets and databases) attempt to organize the data, but much manual intervention (or very complex coding) is required to create anything resembling a financial statement. Without software tools designed to fully exploit XBRL, statement users must resort to cutting and pasting statement data into their analysis worksheets and databases much as they always have. A number of software tools designed to fully exploit XBRL data are now available. Because many accountants are comfortable working in a spreadsheet environment, this article examines Hitachi Xinba XBRL Reader and Analyzer, a Microsoft Excel add-in. The article also briefly discusses four other solutions: Altova MapForce, Rivet Software's Crossfire and CrossView, and Calcbench. The authors have worked with the Altova, Hitachi, and Rivet Software solutions for some time now. Calcbench won XBRL US's 2011 XBRL Challenge. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] XINBA Hitachi Xinba launches as an Excel add-in. It adds a menu to the Excel Ribbon that lets accountants create exactly the analysis spreadsheet needed. The menu offers options for opening a company's XBRL filing, creating and using Excel templates for working with the XBRL data, appending other companies' XBRL data for comparison purposes, inserting XBRL functions, and performing basic ad hoc analyses. Xinba features a connector to the SEC XBRL RSS feed (see Exhibit 1), allowing users to keep up with the latest XBRL filings. In addition, users can connect directly to the web address of the XBRL statement. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Xinba distinguishes itself by allowing users to customize Excel spreadsheets while maintaining a live connection to the XBRL data. It can also save XBRL analysis work as a template that can be used to evaluate multiple companies over multiple periods, all in the familiar Excel environment. Once Xinba has extracted XBRL data to a spreadsheet, the full power of Excel can be leveraged for analysis. The best part is that completed analysis worksheets can be saved as a template to be reused again and again, whether to compare companies or bring in next quarter's data. Exhibit 2 illustrates one way that key data fields can be located and displayed in tables and charts. By working directly in the familiar spreadsheet environment, an accountant is only limited by his or her imagination. …