TIE Commerce XBRL Business Integration Suite

 

Interactive Data

The uptake of XBRL is now happening at a rapid pace. The attempts to restore confidence in the financial markets have lead to the rapid enforcement of Sarbanes-Oxley in the USA and the international accounting standard IFRS. XBRL is more and more regarded as the best way to exchange financial information between organizations. Most notably the Dutch government has decided to create a Dutch Taxonomy and through this provide a 25% reduction in the costs companies have to make in reporting taxes, statistics and annual reports to the government.

In the USA, the Security & Exchange Commission (SEC) is driving the effort to what they call "interactive data". This is the use of computer-coded "tags", written in the XBRL computer language, that each correspond to a unique accounting concept. The use of the tags makes it possible for investors, analysts, and others to download financial reports filed with the SEC directly into spreadsheets in Excel and other popular software, and to use other web tools and specialty software to do instant financial comparisons across entire industries. The SEC has committed to transform its vast database of financial information, nicknamed EDGAR, into interactive data format. Further information can be found on the SEC website.

Standardization efforts in XBRL (Extensible Business Reporting Language) have now reached a point where the standard is stable and where comprehensive taxonomies are available. This is good news for companies, they can now start with the implementation of XBRL. However this brings a new problem: how do we exchange instance documents in a controlled, secure and reliable way.

When messaging volume is low, human involvement in transmitting instance documents is warranted. The few companies today that are using XBRL, place the XBRL reports on their websites, where interested parties can download them or they send them as attachments to e-mail over the Internet. However when messaging volumes increase the need for a more sophisticated transmission with more control over incoming and outgoing information streams - without human intervention- is required. In addition, this process does not address the huge potential that comes from optimized internal reporting workflow automation.

Today there is no infrastructure defined for XBRL although everyone agrees one is required. In eBusiness standardization this problem has been solved many years ago. Where this happened in the past through Value Added Networks, today a solid protocol has been developed to allow the communication between partners in the supply chain to take place over the Internet.

This protocol, ebXML Messaging, has been developed by just about all the major vendors of IT and the players in eBusiness. This open standard can be used freely and has been implemented in many software applications. Recent interoperability tests show that ebXML Messaging is mature and stable and ready-for-use.

XBRL Messaging

The best infrastructure for the exchange of XBRL instance documents is ebMS, ebXML Messaging . This is available today as an Open standard and provides all the required security (integrity, non-repudiation and encryption) as well as reliable messaging. Given the right implementation it gives the user control over all incoming and outgoing trading partner relationships and messages. For further information on ebXML Messaging visit http://www.ebXML.org

TIE has almost two decades of experience in eBusiness interactions. This experience has been incorporated in a sophisticated line of products, that have now been enabled for XBRL. For the messaging component TIE has developed a range of products that will suit the needs of small and big organizations. These products support ebMS, the proposed infrastructure for XBRL, but also a wide range of communication protocols, both internet-based as well as legacy.

TIE has three XBRL products available:

TIE XBRL Business Integration Suite »

This is a set of functions and modules available for developers of ERP and accounting software, that want to integrate XBRL messaging in their own applications.

TIE XBRL Messaging Center »

A highly sophisticated communication server, suitable as a message switching system for large message volumes and extensive trading partner relations. This product was designed to be scalable and has great flexibility is grouping, splitting and transforming messages to be exchanged by multiple partners. TIE XBRL Messaging Center is the ideal solution for Financial Analysts, Banks, Credit Institutions, Infomediaries, Stock Exchanges and Regulators.

TIE XBRL Messaging Portal »

Based on the same framework as TIE XBRL Messaging Center, the TIE XBRL messaging Portal is designed to be the gateway for an organization. It has all the strengths of TIE XBRL Messaging Center, but is geared towards the back-end integration in ERP systems and accounting packages.

Please contact TIE if you are interested in any of these products.