Try XBRL? What language is XBRL?
TryXBRL is a new information resource with XBRL-tagged financial statements for over 12,000 publicly traded corporations. The purpose is to educate financial statement preparers and users on new capabilities for analyzing financial data with reduced cost, time, and complexity. So what is XBRL or eXtensible Business Reporting Language and why should you care?
XBRL is revolutionizing business reporting through electronic communication of business and financial data. The old days of accountants issuing static reports which require laborious and costly processes of manual re-entry and comparison to work with the data are coming to an end. Computers can treat XBRL data "intelligently": they can recognize the information in a XBRL document, select it, analyze it, store it, exchange it with other computers and present it automatically in a variety of ways for users. XBRL greatly increases the speed of handling of financial data, reduces the chance of error and permits automatic checking of information. (ref: http://www.xbrl.org/Home/)
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It's all in good fun, of course, but what makes it funny is that we've all found ourselves scratching our heads at times and wondering the same thing. How come we seem to spend so much more time talking about doing than actually getting something done? At work, at church, at home, even personally. If you're interested in how to change this paradigm and didn't get around to this resource when it first came out, I urge you to take a look at Pfeffer & Sutton's The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge Into Action (Harvard Business School Press, 2000). The book's certainly a great resource to read but also then to keep in a visible place in your office or at home where you won't be sucked back into the land of ideation. For a nice summary of Pfeffer and Sutton's work, visit this link at FastCompany There's also a nice summary of the book available in