About Us

CodeXBRL is a service provided by Iphix, a consultancy focused on helping businesses achieve the significant efficiencies and cost savings enabled by standards-based reengineering of internal and external reporting processes broadly defined.

The Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) is rapidly emerging as the global standard for regulatory reporting and compliance. Since 2004 Iphix is deeply involved both in the development of the XBRL standards and in their practical implementation, always acting as a constant reminder within the XBRL community of internal reporting requirements.

The value proposition of XBRL for regulators, investors and analysts – and in general for entities that collect large amounts of information from numerous sources – is obvious. The attention of management consultants, XBRL experts and XBRL vendors is focused exclusively on the most immediate and visible applications of the technology: regulatory filings and compliance, usually as a consequence of a mandate, like in the case of the Securities and Exchange Commission in the US. As a consequence, businesses are led to think that XBRL is only another format to which their external reports have to be converted, and that it has no applicability or added value for their own internal processes.

The reality is that this vision of XBRL focuses only on the tip of the iceberg in the business reporting supply chain. Standardization of business and financial data enables moving from mainly manual and error-prone processes to automated ones in key internal areas like data integration, monitoring, consolidation, internal and external reporting and auditing. XBRL for financial reporting (XBRL FR) is only one piece of the puzzle: if nothing changes in the way in which reports are created before being converted to XBRL, there is simply no benefit for those that produce those reports. Also, businesses should be aware that the simple conversion of end reports to the relevant XBRL taxonomy is a short-term patch that will prove not scalable, and costly, very soon.

XBRL’s Global Ledger (XBRL GL) is the link between a standardized view of internal data and multiple end reports expressed with XBRL FR taxonomies. It is also the enabler of a broader standards-based architecture, where the same XBRL GL and other standards designed to represent detailed internal data – like documents, entries, ledgers and sub-ledgers – are used to:

1. Represent data residing in disparate systems consistently
2.  Express standardized business rules to validate and process data in the same way, no matter in which application they are created or stored
3. Create an application-independent audit trail from first entry to multiple “views” on the end reports (such as US GAAP and IFRS reporting) where those entries ultimately roll up to

Used together, these standards enable impressive efficiency gains and cost reductions in existing processes, and yes, companies get to comply with the SEC mandate as well, without paying the hidden costs of temporary “bolt-on” conversion solutions.

The CodeXBRL open source tools are, in our vision, the logical complement to a standards-based architecture and an enabler to realize the significant benefits that XBRL and other data standards offer – today.