Recap – why we will all use Inline XBRL

Today we round out our review of some of the main answers to Why should you use Inline XBRL?.

Inline XBRL means a simplified review and improved control. It is probably obvious, but the review of an Inline XBRL document is considerably easier than that of a native XBRL document, simply because you can skip a step – you can be confident that the facts that have been marked up are the same as the “original” because of the single document aspects of the format. It is still necessary to determine whether the document has been prepared using the right taxonomy, whether the facts have been marked up (tagged) with the right concepts and using the correct dates and other context information such as dimensions, but users are very much more comfortable dealing with an Inline XBRL document that you can look at and “touch”, rather than the somewhat more abstract idea of an XBRL formatted rendering of a document. Naturally, Touchstone can deal with either format.

Let’s recap.

• Inline XBRL is about to be an official standard of the XBRL consortium and will be in use by several major regulators shortly.
• Inline XBRL allows you to intersperse XBRL markup instructions inside an ordinary web page.
• Inline XBRL is more accessible, and more easily understood for reporting professionals who are generally very concerned with the formatting of their documents.
• Inline XBRL can be easier for Accounting Software Vendors to implement. And it can be easier to review.

Securities regulators, company registrars and stock exchanges should all consider adopting Inline XBRL as part of their transparency initiatives.