Journal Press India^®

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There has been a paradigm shift in financial reporting after the introduction of Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL). XBRL is a language for electronic communication of business and financial data. The Ministry of Corporate Affairs of Government of India has mandated e-filing of annual reports for certain class of companies in XBRL format from April 1, 2011. Now, more than 1 lakh companies are filing their financial statements through XBRL. The purpose of this paper is to know the users’ awareness about XBRL. The sample for the study includes 76 users. Research instrument was constructed to collect the primary data from the respondents. Hypothesis was tested to know the difference in the users’ perspective about XBRL.  The results of the study were presented in five qualitative characteristics: understandability, reliability, relevance, comparability, and timeliness. The results of the paper indicate that there is more understandability, reliability, and relevance of financial statements among the users along with easier comparison of XBRL reports across companies. ​

Keywords

XBRL; Taxonomy; Instance document; Qualitative characteristics

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