Making XBRL Accessible

Now that the SEC have a heap of expensively produced documents piling up that perhaps people are struggling to analyse, they have turned to the Spanish authorities for inspiration. XBRL Spain announced a competition at the beginning of the summer to create a piece of open source software that would make some sense of this stuff. Not to be outdone, The SEC announced their own competition in July with a closing date of the end of January 2012 (Edit: The competition was actually instigated by xbrl.us, a body set up to administer and promote the use of XBRL in the US). Sadly, the results for the Spanish competition were not “as expected”.

In the meantime all is not lost. Fortunately, many of the people who created this behemoth of a standard, have kindly offered their services to various software & consultancy companies, or even started their own. So you can buy whatever solution you need!

In the coming weeks I will be looking at how these various offerings, free or otherwise might help us to unlock all that XBRL loveliness.