Business reports are changing in response to regulatory and market demands. Requests by regulators for electronic filings of financial statements and tax forms are increasing and such filings are rapidly becoming mandatory in many countries. In response, extensible business reporting language (XBRL) is a market‐driven, collaborative effort to make electronic filings more useful to, and to reduce the burden on, both publishers and consumers of business reports.XBRL does much more than simply list data items that can be submitted in an electronic filing. XBRL is a complete set of tools for regulators or groups to fully communicate the meanings of and interrelationships among the business reporting concepts. In addition, core sets of concepts from regulators or groups can be extended, expanded, or otherwise modified for more specific communication by jurisdictions, industries, or individual corporations.This unique customization capability lets companies better present their electronic filings as parallels to their paper filings. A “customizable standard” offers new opportunities and new challenges. This paper discusses XBRL's paradoxical power ‐ the trade‐offs between customizing to better parallel existing paper reports and compromising to more closely match the standards, and the research needed for the transition from freeform to customized reports.

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is the XBRL Global Technical Leader for PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP. One of the original founders of XBRL, Mr Cohen has served in many leadership and technical roles within the organization. He is a prolifi c author and speaker, and ambassador of XBRL to other groups, including numerous standards organizations and governmental entities. Mr Cohen serves on numerous professional committees for the AICPA, the CICA and the IMA. Mr Cohen ' s professional interests include continuous auditing, data level assurance, and formalising the assurance reliance supply chain. ABSTRACT With the January 2009 mandate by the US Securities and Exchange Commission ofInteractive Data, as well as other governmental mandates and opportunities for compliance burden reductions globally, the Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) is becoming a more common and necessary part of corporate governance and compliance. Due to this external pressure, as well as the primary focus of XBRL advocates themselves to encourage governmental adoption of XBRL for compliance reporting, another important deliverable from XBRL International, Inc. -XBRL ' s Global Ledger Framework (XBRL GL) -and its obvious and immediate benefi ts to organisations has been given much less visibility than the external focused efforts; however, XBRL GL has the potential to bring more measurable benefi t to companies, in addition to helping support the benefi ts regulators and the markets receive from more transparent external reporting. XBRL GL serves as a metadata hub (to facilitate system interoperability), as a common face to data from different systems (facilitating common toolsets and controls) and as a tool to enable a seamless audit trail, spanning gaps between systems. XBRL GL seamlessly integrates incoming transactions and external facing reports, acting as a bridge, a single, holistic, generic view of data. While companies can continue to choose proprietary approaches, and while the XBRL Specifi cation itself is sometimes used as the basis for those approaches, it is a proper combination of XBRL GL with XBRL for external reporting that may offer the greatest benefi t to companies. While XBRL GL has some obvious potential benefi ts, the risk to companies and to the market as a whole is that lack of adoption of XBRL GL will lead to a proliferation of proprietary standards at different points in the Business Reporting Supply Chain and for different consumers, such as the world ' s tax regulators, leading to more confusion and burden instead of providing holistic solutions that provide benefi ts for all. Those responsible for corporate governance have a responsibility to make sure that interoperability solutions are being chosen with an eye on long-term value, and not just the easiest solution in the short term.

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