Financial Data via The Intarweb

Filing your 10-K or 8-K couldn't be any easier.

CFO reports on new web-based technologies that offer up time saving ways to the age old problem: submitting your company's financial data for review. Traditionally, filing options-related data or annual reports was an exercise in tiresome spreadsheet drafting and paper exchange (read: wastage).

XBRL is here to change all of that.

At its roots, eXtensible Business Reporting Language (reaaaal original) is a derivative of the XML programming language, a web-based technology that provides the end user with a type of information. XML's true benefits: easier programming, language comprehension is less intensive when compared to alternatives, and simpl(er) custom-tailoring.

More popular formats of XML such as RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and SVG (Scalable Vector Grahpics) have promoted data exchange and web graphics interaction to a level previously unseen. With XBRL, investors and clients can look forward to information disseminated quicker than before, making the stock market crunch speedier than ever.

But the real beauty comes in the form of increased accountability. From SEC Chairman Christopher Cox's speech dated Feb 9th:

"Once real time disclosure was combined with interactive data ... we began to find clues that had previously gone undetected. That led directly to the discovery of what we now know were billions of dollars of backdated stock option awards.

It's because of the potential interactive data holds to give investors and analysts remarkable new insights into the disclosures we already mandate that the SEC has recently committed to a $54 million initiative to convert all of our filings, and the entire EDGAR system, to this new interactive format.

It is, after all, the 21st century. And it's high time we tap the computing power of today's technology, and take advantage of the real-time speed of the Internet."

Word to ya momz Chris. Now it's only a matter of time before we've got nerdy CEOs with minor degrees in web programming figuring out how to cheat the system.

Backdating? Pfft, that's a thing of the past son.