XBRL® For Dummies®

Introduction

Welcome to XBRL For Dummies! Whether you're a business person (such as a CEO, CFO, accountant, project manager, and so on) or a technical person (that is, a "geek," software architect, developer, or database administrator, and so on), you have done yourself a huge favor by picking up this book if you're trying to find out what this global XBRL phenomenon is all about.

Some of you may have heard about the Extensible Business Reporting Language, or XBRL, before, and you're perhaps somewhat curious about XBRL. You want to understand XBRL, but everything you've seen seems to be overly complex, technically oriented, and filled with jargon. Perhaps you can't really understand what XBRL is from the explanations you've previously encountered, and you have no idea where to even start.

And chances are, you really don't care about XBRL. The truth is, you shouldn't care about XBRL. What you do care about is what XBRL provides and how it will impact what you will likely have to do in the future. You're in luck, because we talk about that topic in this book. We're going to help you get started with XBRL.

About This Book

This book is a thorough introduction to the Extensible Business Reporting Language. This book isn't a programmer's reference book or an exhaustive cookbook of how to use XBRL. We wrote this book for smart, savvy, forward-thinking business people and technologists who want to see the complete picture and don't have a lot of time to muck around trying to pull all these ...