After an appointment with a leading banking group this week, it was refreshing to hear them show the insight into what could be done with the iXBRL document other than send it to HMRC.  Immediately they have plans to reuse the document and post it on their website for their analysts to review.  Because they have over 100 reporting entities in the UK alone, the opportunity to have a common format (they follow our template driven principles) will start to payback from the first year.
Other possible uses that they see for iXBRL in the future included consolidating the information in a central db, this is even more of a incentive to global companies.  iXBRL in the UK isn't a barrier for them to merge their information with their global reporting entities who use XBRL.  XBRL lurks within the iXBRL document and now you can compare your figures from all your global entities with a bit of forethought and planning.

Daniel Roberts in his blogagrees, "One of the benefits of XBRL is the ability to directly consume the information into computer systems to avoid manual re-keying. This is particularly important if a company wants the analyst community to either cover the company, or at a minimum to include the company as a comparator to a covered company. Any need to re-key information would impose time and error costs on analysts, and will ‘de-select’ that company from the list of comparators, if it is possible to simply import the information provided by another company in the same industry segment"  Read the rest of Dan's blog at http://xbrlblog.com/ixbrl-uk-companies-have-a-great-opportunity.html