eXtensible Business Reporting Language
XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) is an open, XML-based standard for tagging financial and business data so that it can be read and processed by software. Instead of reporting "Net income: $96,995 million" only as text on a page, XBRL attaches a machine-readable tag to that number identifying what the value represents, the period it covers, the reporting entity, the currency, and the precision. This turns a static document into structured data that can be extracted, compared, and analyzed at scale.
The SEC requires public companies to submit the financial statements in their 10-K and 10-Q filings in XBRL format, which is what makes large-scale, cross-company fundamental analysis from SEC filings possible.
Each tagged value in an XBRL document is called a "fact." A fact ties together four things: the concept being reported (drawn from a taxonomy element such as `us-gaap:NetIncomeLoss`), the context (which entity and which time period), the unit (for example, USD), and the value itself, along with a "decimals" attribute that records the precision of the figure.
The SEC began phasing in mandatory XBRL financial-statement reporting in 2009, starting with the largest filers and expanding to all public companies. Originally the XBRL data was filed as a separate exhibit alongside the human-readable document; the standard has since evolved into Inline XBRL, which embeds the tags directly inside the HTML filing.
Because XBRL facts are tied to specific taxonomy elements, the same concept can be located consistently across thousands of companies and years. GeminIQ reads these XBRL facts directly from EDGAR, preserving each company's as-filed values rather than mapping them onto a normalized third-party schema.
A: XBRL makes financial disclosures machine-readable, so investors, analysts, and regulators can extract and compare data across companies and periods without manually re-keying figures from PDFs. It improves transparency and lowers the cost of analyzing filings at scale.
A: The XBRL data represents the same numbers reported in the human-readable financial statements, but in a structured, tagged form. Inline XBRL combines both into a single document so the figures you read and the data machines extract are guaranteed to match.
A: A taxonomy is the dictionary of reporting concepts that XBRL tags reference. The U.S. GAAP taxonomy, for example, defines elements like revenue, net income, and total assets, along with their definitions and relationships.
Further Reading: What Is XBRL?
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