• A standards-based method with which users can prepare, publish in a variety of formats, exchange and analyze financial statements.
• Freely licensed, permitting the automatic exchange and reliable extraction of financial information across all software formats and technologies, including the Internet.
• Beneficial to all users of the financial information supply chain: public and private companies, the accounting profession, regulators, analysts, the investment community, capital markets and lenders, as well as key third parties such as software developers and data aggregators.
• Not requiring companies to disclose any additional information beyond that which they normally disclose under existing accounting standards. It does not require a change to existing accounting standards.
• Improving access to financial information
• Reducing the need to enter financial information more than one time. It reduces the risk of data entry error and eliminates the need to manually key information for various formats, such as printed financial statements, HTML documents for Web sites, EDGAR filing documents, raw XML files or other specialized reporting formats such as credit reports and loan documents. It thereby lowers the cost to prepare and distribute financial statements while improving investor and analyst access to information.
• Leveraging efficiencies of the Internet as today's primary source of financial information by making Web browser searches more accurate and relevant. More than 80% of major US public companies provide some type of financial disclosure on the Internet.
• Meeting the needs of today's investors and other users of financial information by providing accurate and reliable information to help them make informed financial decisions.

Source: www.xbrl.org