What are XBRL and iXBRL?

XBRL stands for eXtensible Business Reporting Language. This simply means that this is a language for business reporting that can be added to if it does not have the correct concepts for what you are trying to report. XBRL is a collection of computer-readable tags that can be applied to financial statements and other business data. For example, there is a unique tag for ‘Revenue’ and another different tag for ‘Share Capital’.

XBRL uses dictionaries, known as taxonomies to group financial concepts, or elements (tags) together. A taxonomy defines a tag for an item of business data, its properties and its relationships to other elements.

iXBRL is the placing of these XBRL tags inside an XHTML webpage so that software can read and analyse the tagged data. It is extremely important that the financial data and applied tags are accurate as software may not be able to compensate for errors in the same way that a human reader could.