Is XBRL the bridge to truly sustainable companies?

Imagine you are a computer and your job is to analyze information about investment opportunities. You have been programmed to scan reports that match a template your programmer gave you. If data fits into that template, you can understand it. If it does not, the programmer has to come adjust your template so you can make sense of the parts that do not fit.

The problem is, these days there are an incredible number of different types of investment opportunities, many of which have different types of data – some are debt, some are equity, some are debt that’s convertible into equity…not to mention their geographies or environmental and social sectors and impacts, which factor into their financial risk/return. It’s very difficult to keep up with all the template adjustments that need to be made to keep track of let alone extract business intelligence from all these entities, and all that programming time gets expensive. Many in the finance industry have been bothered by this for some time, so recently some clever folks came together to come up with a better way to enable computers to understand financial data coming from any source: XBRL.

XBRL means “eXtensible Business Reporting Language”… this is a fancy term for enabling computers to easily make sense of and work with financial reports from all different sources, by assigning a different tag to each type of data in the report. For example, “net revenues” has its own tag, so a computer can quickly determine which item is net revenues, no matter where it is found in the report, or what type of entity’s net revenues are being listed. This translates into tremendous time and cost savings in the tracking and analysis of financial performance for investors and company managers alike. It is incredibly handy in today’s complex financial world, since there are so many different types of financial instruments, and not all financial reports are structured identically. But where it gets really exciting from our point of view is when it comes to the next frontier of finance: managing information about social and environmental returns.

Measuring financial performance is closely related to measuring performance in terms of social or environmental impact. In both cases there is a need to track quantitative (dollars and numbers) information specific to a given organization, although in the latter case it is also important to track the nature or degree of change, as well as testimonials that may include audio and video, which as of now XBRL doesn’t cover. And in both cases, the variety among and change within the myriad types of organizations makes it quite costly to keep a technology-based information management system current. As such, XBRL might hold some keys to reducing the cost of not only financial performance data analysis, but also social and environmental data analysis.

It’s worth noting that XBRL has been created using an open standard, which is to say that everyone in the XBRL network can gain access to and work to improve the basic taxonomy that forms the basis of the business reporting “language” of XBRL- (the taxonomy is more or less the equivalent of the XBRL “source code”). However, access to XBRL is not free; the gateway is through XBRL International, Inc. (XII), a membership fee-driven nonprofit that functions as an international standards organization to ensure the language’s core structure is maintained and supported, and facilitate consensus. (One division, XBRL-US, was chosen to define the standard that would be used by United States corporations when the US Securities and Exchange Commission mandated that they report financial information using XBRL beginning at the end of 2008.) XII’s members are a consortium of companies, consultants, governmental entities, and nonprofits, many of which have a financial incentive to promote the standard’s mass adoption. Each partner is free to charge customers for providing them services that involve the use of XBRL, not unlike the relationship between Linux and Red Hat.

The only group we are aware of as now that has forayed into the use of XBRL to help track social impact is the Acumen Fund/Google/Salesforce/ANDE/(and many others) effort that has led over the past 2 years to the creation of Pulse, a tool for managing impact investor portfolio data. Acumen has an RFP out right now for a home for Pulse that we think could potentially function somewhat similarly to XII. Stay tuned for more updates!

In honor of Bastille Day we looked up the French for XBRL, and it is XBRL!