A new machine language is going to rapidly reshape the business reporting environment leading to big falls in the cost of accounting & regulatory reporting services. The language is going to be shared by humans & machines for talking about financial transactions - that language is XBRL.

Currently, Treasury & the ATO are working alongside accounting application developers to enable accounting applications with a new form of reporting based on XBRL called Simplified Business Reporting (SBR) . All other government agencies are also restructuring their forms along a common Australian taxonomy that conforms to the international XBRL reporting taxonomy.

This new XML type language gets its power from its ability to carry coherent communication between different accounting and reporting applications without those applications every being able to communicate otherwise except by developiong tedious mapping rules for each individual information transformation. Additionally the information can carry self validating rules to test its own truth within relationships i.e assets less liabilities = shareholders funds.

We are one step closer to a world that is virtually free.