While XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language), has been in use on a voluntary basis for awhile, the long slow road to making it a requirement ended this past December with the SEC’s announcement officially mandating it for large public companies (requirements for smaller companies will be phased in). We have argued for years that, as important as XBRL is from a regulatory point of view, its benefit for internal corporate and inter-company financial operations is reason enough to adopt it.

Given the current mess in the financial markets, XBRL has even more potential. Mark Cuban suggests using XBRL to help track the bailout money. Sounds like a great idea, and hopefully others will think of additional uses of this already-existing tool.

Thanks for the tweet Andrew!