Easy Exchange Of Financial Reports Via The Internet

SAP AG, a provider of inter-enterprise software solutions and member of the international Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) Project Committee, recently announced the launch of XBRL. It will be adopting this standard within SAP Strategic Enterprise Management (SEM) with mySAP.com. XBRL is a free, XML-based specification that uses accepted financial reporting standards and practices for exchanging financial reports across all software and technologies, including the Internet. XBRL for financial statements is currently under review by the accounting profession and is anticipated to reach the market in July 2000. Users will benefit from XBRL format templates for reporting financial statements data to internal and external users such as business partners, financial analysts, investors, stock exchanges, tax authorities, and government or nongovernment organizations. "We're committed to guiding this effort and will make XBRL part of our solutions. SAP SEM will include ready-to-use XBRL templates for reporting, financial consolidation, modeling, simulation, and planning and budgeting," says Werner Sinzig, program director of SEM Product Development at SAP AG. Once information is entered, it can be rendered in any form -- a printed financial statement, an HTML document for a company's Web site, an EDGAR filing document with the SEC, a raw XML file, or other specialized reporting formats such as credit reports or loan documents.