The Securities and Exchange Commission has introduced software on its Web site that lets people view filings submitted by companies using extensible business reporting language.
The SEC announced its Financial Explorer application Friday, providing graphical views of financial statements from the more than 70 companies that are participating in the XBRL pilot program.
The application is available at
Christopher Cox, the SEC's chairman and an advocate of the initiative, said in a press release: "With Financial Explorer or another XBRL viewer, investors will be able to quickly make sense of financial statements. In the near future, potentially millions of people will be able to analyze and compare financial statements and make better-informed investment decisions. That's a big benefit to ordinary investors."
Financial companies that have submitted XBRL filings to the SEC include E-Trade Financial Corp., Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., and NYSE Euronext Inc.
XBRL is a version of extensible markup language, which employs a standard set of tags to identify data elements so that different software applications can process them automatically. Financial institutions have been submitting quarterly call reports in the XBRL format since the third quarter of 2006.
