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XBRL
Also called: eXtensible Business Reporting Language, Inline XBRL, iXBRL, company facts, XBRL frames
The machine-readable tags SEC filers attach to every number in their financial statements, so software can read financials without parsing documents.
Explanation
Each value in a 10-K, 10-Q or 20-F is tagged with a concept from a taxonomy, such as us-gaap:CashAndCashEquivalentsAtCarryingValue or ifrs-full:Revenue, plus its period, unit and scale. Cover-page facts use the dei (document and entity information) taxonomy, including dei:EntityCommonStockSharesOutstanding and dei:EntityPublicFloat. Since the Inline XBRL phase-in, the tags live inside the HTML filing itself.
The SEC publishes the tagged data through free APIs: company facts (every fact a company has reported) and frames (one fact per company for a calendar period, across all filers). That is how a single tool can line up thousands of companies.
XBRL is only as good as the tagging. Companies switch tags over time, invent custom ones, report cash flow year-to-date rather than per quarter, and occasionally get the scale wrong by a factor of 1,000. Share counts are tagged as filed, so they are not adjusted for later stock splits.
Why it matters
XBRL makes cross-company analysis possible, but every number taken from it needs normalizing: choosing the right tag, deriving single quarters and restating share counts for splits.
How Equity Dictionary measures it
Financials use an ordered list of candidate tags per metric, merged by period, and the latest filing wins when a value is restated. Quarters are derived from year-to-date cash-flow facts (marked †), share counts filed before a split are restated to today’s basis, and the screener is built from SEC frames, at most 22 SEC requests a day, rejecting values off by a factor of 1,000.
Related terms
- Trailing twelve months (TTM): The sum of the last four reported quarters, giving an annual figure that updates every quarter instead of once a year.
- Form 10-K and 10-Q: The annual (10-K) and quarterly (10-Q) reports US public companies file with the SEC, containing their financial statements and management’s discussion.
- Public float: The market value of shares held by non-affiliates, meaning everyone except officers, directors and controlling holders: the SEC’s yardstick for company size.
- Form 20-F and 6-K: The annual report (20-F) and current reports (6-K) that foreign private issuers listed in the US file in place of the 10-K, 10-Q and 8-K.
- SIC code: The four-digit Standard Industrial Classification code the SEC assigns to each registrant to describe its main line of business.
Plain-English summary for research; not legal or investment advice.