Xtreme Accounting -- It's Coming

Time to learn another acronym. Later this month a new version of xBRL, a subset of the XML Internet language intended to standardize how financial data is shared among Web-based applications, will be released. Leading makers of accounting software say they will incorporate xBRL-tagging capabilities into their products by the end of the year. This will go a long way toward transforming xBRL from a promising concept to a useful reality, but experts caution it will be several years before the code reaches its full potential. Until then, companies that want to exchange and analyze financial data over the Internet must continue to rekey or repackage much of it.

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