Forbes has always been at the forefront of XBRL development in the UK, starting work on our class library in December 2003.
Our Final accounts production package was the first package to successfully file XBRL accounts with Companies House back in 2005.
ProTax, our CT package, the only package to send XBRL CT computations to the HMRC prior to the introduction of iXBRL.
On the 12th November 2009. Forbes was the first product to be accredited for iXBRL accounts and computations and is ready for live filing.
XBRL is a format for accounts and other financial data such as CT computations that is designed to be readable both by humans and computers.
The human readable display contains hidden markers so that it can be understood by a computer program.
With this tagging information software can look at the final accounts and identify say the turnover or he cost of sales.
In traditional XBRL the rendering of this data is done in a uniform but inflexible way by something called a stylesheet.
In inline XBRL or iXBRL, the rendering for a human to read is done in HTML and then the xBRL tags are embedded in it.
XBRL at companies house
Forbes Accounts has supported XBRL filing at CH since 2005
Click here to see Limited Company XBRL abbreviated accounts prepared for viewing.
Click here to see the underlying data that is transmitted.
What XBRL is not
XBRL is not a replacement for generic page description formats such as pdf. Any document can be printed to pdf and can be transmitted electronically.
It can be viewed on a computer, but cannot be understood by a computer - a piece of software cannot look at a pdf set of accounts and detect that the turnover is over £65,000 say.
Further R&D
Producing inline XBRL in a suitable designed accounts production package is quite straightforward.
Taking an extant set of accounts in say a Word document and marking them up as XBRL is currently possible, but is a manual process involving an operator highlighting figures and selecting their "meaning" from a list of possible XBRL elements.
We currently have a development project under way for an expert system that will take a set of accounts in say a word document and identify items such as turnover, cost of sales, detailed P&L and mark it up as an iXBRL document.
Such a fully automated system is months if not years away, but in the shorter term parts of this technology will be used in our manual mark up tools to at least semi-automate the process.
