Recently, Oracle joined XBRL US, the national consortium for XML business reporting standards to stay ahead of the technology and help increase XBRL adoption by U.S. companies by 2011. Large accelerated filers were mandated to use XBRL starting in 2009; other large filers started in 2010 and all other public companies must comply in June 2011.

Here is a list of other organizations that recently joined XBRL US:

• Oracle


• Citi


• Federal Filings LLC


• Edgar Agents LLC


• XSP

For those of you who have been living under a rock, XBRL stands for eXtensible Business Reporting Language. Simply put, it's reporting electronically. Just like PDFs or spreadsheets are a type of output, XBRL is another output option in electronic form.

Right now, the transition to XBRL means extra work for publicly traded companies because they need to file their financial statements in both EDGAR and XBRL formats. Once the SEC phases out the EDGAR system, XBRL will be the primary way to deliver financial information with footnotes and supporting schedules to multiple audiences without having to re-key or reformat the information. A single XBRL document can be converted to printed output, published via the Web, fed into an SEC database (e.g. EDGAR) or forwarded to a creditor for analysis.

Question: How does Oracle support XBRL reporting?

Answer: The latest XBRL 2.1 specifications are supported by Oracle Hyperion Disclosure Management, which is part of Oracle's Hyperion Financial Close Suite along with Hyperion Financial Management, Hyperion Financial Data Quality Management and Hyperion Financial Close Management. Hyperion Disclosure Management supports the authoring of financial filings in Microsoft Office, with "hot links" to reports and data stored in Hyperion Financial Management or Oracle Essbase. It supports the XBRL tagging of financial statements as well as the disclosures and footnotes within your 10K and 10Q filings. Because many of our customers use Hyperion Financial Management (HFM) for their consolidation needs, they simply generate XBRL statements from their consolidated financial results.

Question: What if you don't use Hyperion Financial Management, and you only use E-Business Suite General Ledger or PeopleSoft General Ledger?

Answer: No problem, all you need is Hyperion Disclosure Management to generate XBRL from your general ledger. Here are the steps:

1. Upload the XBRL taxonomy from the SEC or XBRL website into Hyperion Disclosure Management.
2. Publish your financial statements out of general ledger to Excel.
3. Perform the XBRL tag mapping from the Excel output to Hyperion Disclosure Management.

For more information and some interesting background on XBRL, I recommend reading What You Need To Know About XBRL written by our EPM expert, John O'Rourke.