XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) is a language based on XML (Extensible Markup Language) family of languages. It is an open standards-based reporting system that is built to accommodate the electronic preparation and exchange of business reports around the world using internet as a medium. It has been defined specifically to meet the requirements of business and financial information.


It enables unique identifying tags to be applied to items of accounting data. The tags provide a range of information about the item, such as whether it is a monetary item, percentage or fraction. XBRL not only allows labels in any language to be applied to items, it also allows the accounting references or other subsidiary information to be added to the tags.

XBRL can be applied to a very wide range of business applications including financial and cost data. XBRL has applications in the following areas:-

Reporting for internal and external purposes by an entity involving financial and costing data/information.

Business reporting to all types of regulators, including tax and financial authorities, central banks and governments.

Filing of loan reports and applications; credit risk assessments.

Exchange of information between government departments, institutions and banks.

All types of organisations can make use of XBRL to automate their process of data collection and distribution to various stakeholders. It helps in saving costs and improving the efficiency in managing business information – financial or cost. XBRL, being extensible and flexible, can be adapted to a wide variety of requirements. All stakeholders whether they are preparers, transmitters or users of business data in the financial information supply chain can benefit from the use of XBRL.

XBRL has a bright future ahead of it that goes way beyond the current focus on regulatory reporting and compliance. Businesses that are now creating XBRL filings for regulatory bodies should be thinking about how they can leverage their investment in understanding and using XBRL to drive more consistent and comparable internal reporting. By tagging data at the account/transaction level, by investigating how XBRL can help to deliver new holistic reports that integrate and connect financial and non-financial data, and by leveraging emerging online XBRL data streams for better industry performance and peer group analytics, every business can power its own journey towards financial transformation.

The Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) is managed and promoted by XBRL International, a not-for-profit consortium, with companies, government bodies and other organizations as its members. Currently over 600 organizations are associated with XBRL International. It is comprised of jurisdictions, which represent countries, regions or international bodies and which focus on the progress of XBRL in their area.

Government and Regulators require cost data of different sectors for policy making. The availability of cost data [without compromising on the confidentiality] in XBRL format enables informed decision making and for sectoral studies.
With full adoption of XBRL, companies would be able to integrate its financial and cost data across its operational areas and exercise better control on its activities.

Costing Taxonomy is a dictionary of all cost elements required in the cost audit report and compliance report. The costing taxonomy contains the properties and interrelationships of all these cost elements for the purposes of capturing the required reporting data in XBRL format.

The Costing Taxonomy and related Business Rules including sample instance documents can be downloaded from the website of MCA (http://mca.gov.in). The specific links are as follows:

Costing Taxonomy -
http://www.mca.gov.in/Ministry/pdf/Costing_Taxonomy_2012-11-22_v1.0.zip
Business Rules –
http://www.mca.gov.in/Ministry/pdf/Revised_Business_Rules_Updated_XBRL_Costing_29.11.2012.zip

The excel sheets are for reference and easy understanding of various components of taxonomy in a human readable form. The excel workbook contains the following worksheets:-
a. Elements: This worksheet contains all the concepts that form the costing taxonomy. The concepts are defined as elements/tags along with their characteristics such as data type, balance type, Nillable etc. e.g. cost of sales of product or activity group is an element defined as:

Characteristic	Property	Meaning
Element Name	CostofSalesofProductorActivityGroup	Name of the Element / Tag
Preferred Label	Cost of sales of product or activity group	Label that would appear in the rendered report
Label Role	Standard label	It is a standard label
Abstract	False	Abstract is False implies element can be used to tag data. Abstract set to True indicates that the element is only used in a hierarchy to group related elements together and cannot be used to tag data in an instance document.
Data Type	Monetary Item Type	It is monetary data type
Balance Type	Debit	The balance is debit balance
Period	Duration	The concept is reported for the period (financial year)
Substitution Group	Item	This tells whether the element is item, tuple, hypercube or dimension.
Nillable	True	Nillable set to true means the element can take empty values. If set to False it would means that the element in the instance should have non empty value.

b. Labels: This worksheet contains the 491 nos. of labels to be used as preferred labels in the final presentation (rendering) of the report in human readable format. A screenshot of the labels is given below:


c. References: This worksheet contains the relationships between elements and the references of the elements defined by authoritative literature. The reference parts used are listed below:

Reference part	Use
Name	CAS
Publisher	Institute of Cost Accountants of India
Section	Title of sections of standard or interpretation
Paragraph	Paragraph (number) in the standard
Subparagraph	Subparagraph (number) of a paragraph

d. Extended Link Cost Audit Report: This worksheet contains the Extended Link Role definitions contained in the Cost Audit Report. Extended Link Roles represents a set of relationships between concepts and are the logical grouping of elements. The extended links are then used in link bases to build the relationships. The list of extended link roles in the Cost Audit Report are:



e. Presentation Cost Audit Report: This worksheet defines the structure of the Cost Audit Report for displaying the data along with preferred label attribute and the specific order in which they appear. This enables the taxonomy users to view the representation of elements in the human readable format. The illustration below shows the presentation of Product or Activity Group Details (Para 3 of the Annexure to Cost Audit Report):



f. Calculation Cost Audit Report: This worksheet contains the Additive relationships between numeric items expressed as parent-child hierarchies in the Cost Audit Report. Each calculation child has a weight attribute (+1 or -1) based upon the natural balance of the parent and child items. Illustration below represents the calculation view of the Value addition and distribution of earnings of the Annexure to Cost Audit Report (Para 8):



g. Definition Cost Audit Report: It is used to express the dimensional relationship between elements of the Costing Taxonomy for the Cost Audit Report. An illustration of the definition linkbase for the Cost Audit Report showing elements of the Product or Activity Group Details is given below:



h. Extended Link Compliance Report: This worksheet contain the Extended Link Role definitions contained in the Compliance Report. Extended Link Roles represents a set of relationships between concepts and are the logical grouping of elements. The extended links are then used in link bases to build the relationships. The list of extended link roles in the Compliance Report are:

i. Presentation Compliance: This worksheet defines the structure of the Compliance Report for displaying the data along with preferred label attribute and the specific order in which they appear. This enables the taxonomy users to view the representation of elements in the human readable format. The illustration below shows the presentation of Quantitative Information (Para 2 of the Annexure to Compliance Report):



j. Calculation Compliance Report: This worksheet contains the Additive relationships between numeric items expressed as parent-child hierarchies in the Compliance Report. Each calculation child has a weight attribute (+1 or -1) based upon the natural balance of the parent and child items. Illustration below represents the calculation view of the Quantitative Information and Reconciliation Statement of the Annexure to Compliance report:



k. Definition Compliance Report: It is used to express the dimensional relationship between elements of the Costing Taxonomy for the Cost Audit Report. An illustration of the definition linkbase for the Compliance Report showing elements of the Quantitative Information (Para 2) is given below:

Taxonomy file has extensions of XML and XSD. An XBRL processor (computer software that understands and/or manipulates XBRL documents) will need those XML and XSD documents.