Technology

XBRL-US, the United States division of the AICPA-led trade group sponsoring the extensible business reporting language (XBRL), releases the results of an Institute-conducted survey ( www.xbrl.org ), which showed two-thirds of vendors either had made at least one of their accounting software products XBRL-enabled or planned to do so by December 2004.

XBRL uses XML “tags” to describe data elements contained in public and private companies’ financial statements. These attributes make it easier to assemble information and reissue it in a wide variety of formats without data reentry or other time-consuming manual processes.