XBRL - A Tool for Efficient Disclosure of Integrated Corporate Information

Abstract

The main duty of every corporate house is to disclose its business affairs to various stakeholders. Stakeholders are the group of people having direct or indirect interest on the business performance and its positional aspects. To disclose information related to the firm performance and its position it must rely upon a particular mode. In the earlier days the business information was circulated through clay, paper and other unstructured formats such as word, PDF, html etc., these reports are only readable by human but not by machine. This leads to an increase in dependency on the manual process which results in high costs and inefficiency of reports. So there is a necessity to have a structured format of financial reports which are readable by both human and machines. This can be done only through the digital form of the reporting system. One of the available tools to report the corporate information which is readable by both machine and human is XBRL. The present study analysed the benefits of XBRL to various stakeholders and also examined the efficiency in disclosing the integrated corporate information. For this purpose data was collected through primary and secondary sources and collected data were analysed with the help of descriptive and t-t test and found that the XBRL financial reporting is most efficient than traditional reporting and gives wider benefits to all classes of stakeholders.