2007 XBRL Awareness Survey Results

  

The CFA Institute Centre completed a three-week survey to gauge the level of awareness of XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) and its application for delivering financial reports and other disclosures to end users, including analysts, investors, creditors, and investment advisers.

 

The survey also asked for members’ views on the key characteristics of data most important to performing their analyses of companies and how they obtain data about the companies that they analyze and invest in.

 

Survey results (PDF) Response overview How we conducted the survey Actual survey (PDF)

Observations from the analysis:

 

• The identified attributes, when fully integrated, will make it easier to understand a company’s complex business operations and compare it to peer companies and alternative investments

 

• Valuation analysis is only as good as the data/information put into the models. With XBRL, analysts increase the reliability of their valuation with properly tagged data

 

• With a taxonomy of increased granularity, the investment professional can relate the footnote disclosures directly to values from the face of the financial statements

 

• Given the wealth of information available in the company reports, XBRL increases the valuation consistency by pinpointing the commonly extracted items

 

• Having computer-readable reports increases the timeliness of the updates and eliminates potential "human error" in the updating process

 

• Authoritative guidance on extensions will increase comparability across companies and time-periods