The IT and tax faculties of ICAEW recently joined forces to present an event entitled 'demystifying XBRL'. The breakfast presentation was designed to help attendees understand, and prepare for, the imminent requirement to file returns, computations and accounts online using iXBRL (inline eXtensible Business Reporting Language). Just in case you were wondering how imminent, the use of iXBRL will be mandatory for all Corporation Tax returns from April 1 2011 (with some exemptions regarding accounts for certain unincorporated organisations). The CT 600, computations and accounts will all need to be filed online using iXBRL. The event was full with a waiting list for those turned away but repeats are planned in London and around the country in the new year. It will be repeated in Chartered Accountants’ Hall on 1 March; then it's planned to do Bristol on 2 March, Durham on 4 March; Birmingham and Manchester will be on 25 and 26 February but we’re not yet sure which way round. Keep an eye on IT Counts for further details and a link for online bookings …

On to the detail of the event. Paul Booth kicked off the event with a brilliantly straightforward explanation of the technology underlying iXBRL. In just a few PowerPoint slides (Paul Booth's iXBRL PowerPoint slides) he took the audience from making a word on a web page 'bold' to being able to allow a computer to extract the relevant information from a page of accounts and know how to process it. We'll start with the language of web pages, HTML (HyperText Markup Language). At its simplest, HTML allows a computer to render text in a particular format by using 'tags'. If you want a word to appear in bold text on your web page, you would turn on bold using the bold tag and then turn it off again:

<b>bold</b>

From HTML we go to XML (eXtensible Markup Language) which uses exactly the same structure to greatly increase the power of a web page. HTML enables humans to read content, XML allows both humans and computers to read web pages. By adding a descriptive tag to an element within a web page, a computer can extract the information directly. For example, if you wanted a computer program to be able to 'read' a page of text and extract the value for 'Profit' from within it, you could produce something like the following:

The profit for the year was <profit>10000</profit>

Again we just use simple text tags, but this time to describe what the element is, rather than just how it should be displayed. (There is an alternative explanation of XML already on IT Counts featuring Liz Hurley.)

XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) is simply a method of organising XML tags in a way that makes them useful for business reporting by being able to show relationships and underlying calculations. This involves the use of a taxonomy which is just a method of classifying items within a collection. In business reporting this means that insurance would be part of administration expenses which in turn would be part of profit or loss. To take a more tangible example, whether your music collection is on vinyl or iPod, the track 'You can't always get what you want' is on the album 'Let it Bleed' by the artist 'Rolling Stones':