EDGAR Online, Inc. has announced the launch of an 'XBRL Express' web site designed to serve as a public repository for company financial statements tagged in XBRL. The new web site will function "as a marketplace for companies and organizations wishing to display their XBRL statements and where XBRL developers can demonstrate their applications and tools. XBRL Express represents the first step towards a centralized XBRL repository for all public companies, and initially will provide access to tagged XBRL statements from 80 companies in 12 industries; the designers envision the XBRL Express Repository as a resource for analysts, investors, credit and lending institutions, news organizations and accountants for storing and referencing company financials prepared and published in XBRL format. XBRL (Extensible Business Reporting Language) has been developed as a business-specific XML financial reporting language being advanced by the XBRL Organization, a global consortium of over 120 companies including the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA), Institute of Management Accountants (IMA) and other major financial services, technology, and public accounting organizations. The Bank of America recently announced that XBRL is being piloted to collect data from its customers that are required to provide financial statements on a regular basis for lending and credit analysis purposes. XBRL is expected to become the standard way in which U.S. public companies will prepare, report and disseminate their financial information."

From the XBRL Express FAQ document:

XBRL (Extensible Business Reporting Language), formerly code named XFRML, is a freely available electronic language for financial reporting. It is an XML-based framework that provides the financial community a standards-based method to prepare, publish in a variety of formats, reliably extract and automatically exchange financial statements of publicly held companies and the information they contain. XBRL is not about establishing new accounting standards but enhancing the usability of the ones that we have through the digital language of business. XBRL will not require additional disclosure from companies to outside audiences.

Uses: An XBRL-based financial statement is a digitally enhanced version of paper-based financial statements, which include the balance sheet, income statement, statement of equity, statement of cash flows, and the notes to the financial statements as well as the accountant's report. "XBRL for Financial Statements" enables a dramatic improvement in the processing of financial reports. XBRL documents can be prepared efficiently, exchanged reliably, published more easily, analyzed quickly, retrieved by investors simply, and enables smarter investments. Potential XBRL applications include: (1) XBRL for Financial Statements: financial statements of all sorts used to exchange financial information (2) XBRL for Taxes: specification for tax returns which are filed and information exchanged for items which end up on tax returns (3) XBRL for Regulatory Filings: specifications for the large number of filings required by government and regulatory bodies (4) XBRL for Accounting and Business Reports: management and accounting reporting such as all the reports that are created by your accounting system rendered in XML to make re-using them possible (5) XBRL for Authoritative Literature: a standard way for describing accounting related authoritative literature published by the AICPA, FASB, ASB, and others to make using these resources easier, 'drill downs' into literature from financials possible.