XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) provides a language in which reporting terms can be authoritatively defined. Those terms can then be used to uniquely represent the contents of financial statements or other kinds of compliance, performance and business reports. XBRL lets reporting information move between organisations rapidly, accurately and digitally.
More information on XBRL can be found at www.xbrl.org.

Most companies previously file their Financial Statements in PDF format. By adopting XBRL standards, ACRA believes it can facilitate the conduct of business in Singapore, by providing more value-added financial information and enhancing the regulatory environment with improved transparency and timely dissemination of relevant financial information.

XBRL enables source data to be tagged electronically, making the data machine-readable. Thus, the user’s system can automatically extract the information without the need for copy-pasting or keying-in. XBRL enables tagging of numbers, quantitative data and textual information. The benefits of XBRL go beyond compliance since any data collation process can be streamlined using electronic tags.