Learning Objectives

By the end of this section, readers will be able to:

  • Identify various types of disclosures that XBRL can support, including financial, prudential, sustainability, tax, and energy-related information
  • Understand how the flexibility of XBRL enables adaptation to evolving regulatory and business reporting needs
  • Distinguish between open and closed reporting models and their implications for report structure, validation, and rendering
  • Briefly describe the main XBRL formats and their typical use in different reporting environments

Introduction

While XBRL is often associated with financial reporting, its flexibility and domain-agnostic design have enabled its application across a broadening range of disclosures, from banking and insurance to sustainability, tax, and infrastructure.

This section outlines the different types of disclosures supported by XBRL, the taxonomies developed to meet regulatory needs, and how the standard has evolved to address increasingly complex reporting environments.

Types of Disclosures Supported by XBRL

XBRL is a domain-agnostic data exchange framework, meaning it is not hardcoded for any specific industry or regulatory context. Instead, it provides a flexible, extensible architecture that allows domain-specific requirements, whether financial, prudential, sustainability, or beyond, to be defined by those who understand them best. Rather than prescribing a fixed set of data points or rules, XBRL enables taxonomy creators to define their own concepts, data types, unit types, and dimensional structures, tailored precisely to the reporting needs of their domain.

This flexibility extends to validation rules, presentation templates, and reporting constraints, all of which can be designed to reflect the logic and structure required by a given use case. Whether modelling a financial statement, a risk report, or an ESG disclosure, XBRL provides the technical scaffolding, while leaving the content, semantics, and enforcement logic to be specified by regulators, standard setters, or industry bodies. This separation of technical framework and domain content is what makes XBRL a powerful and adaptable solution for structured digital reporting across sectors.

XBRL Across Domains

XBRL is used across a broad spectrum of disclosure types. The following categories represent common areas where the standard is actively applied, though additional use cases continue to emerge as regulatory needs evolve.

Financial Statements Disclosure

Financial disclosures represent the most traditional and widely adopted use of XBRL. XBRL was originally developed with financial statements in mind. The goal was to bring structure, comparability, and automation to the reporting of balance sheets, income statements, and related financial data.

In 2009, the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) Foundation published the first official XBRL IFRS Taxonomy, enabling global adoption by companies using IFRS to tag and structure their financial statements, and has since released annual updates to reflect changes in accounting standards and enhance digital reporting practices. The IFRS taxonomy features a hierarchical structure and multilingual labels, making it a globally adopted base taxonomy for consistent financial reporting across jurisdictions.

In the United States, the SEC began accepting XBRL-tagged US Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) filings in 2008. The US GAAP were initially designed for quarterly (10-Q) and annual financial reports (10-K) but have since been extended to cover other types of disclosures beyond traditional financial statements. The US GAAP taxonomy features modelling to support detailed tagging of notes disclosures.

In addition to these accounting standards-based taxonomies, many jurisdictions have extended and developed taxonomies based on local accounting standards. These allow authorities to incorporate region-specific disclosures into their XBRL taxonomy framework while maintaining consistency with international structures.

Prudential Reporting for Banking and Insurance

Prudential disclosures play a key role in enabling regulators to assess the stability, solvency, and risk profile of financial institutions. These reports often include detailed data on capital adequacy, liquidity, asset quality, and risk exposure.

In Europe, regulators in the banking and insurance sectors have widely adopted XBRL for supervisory reporting. The European Banking Authority (EBA) requires the collection of disclosures under the Capital Requirements Directive (CRD) and the Capital Requirements Regulation (CRR) using XBRL. Similarly, the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority (EIOPA) uses XBRL to collect Solvency II filings, capturing complex, risk-based metrics from insurance undertakings and pension funds.

Likewise, central banks in countries such as Japan, China, and India have mandated the use of XBRL for collecting regulatory and supervisory data from financial institutions.

These regulatory frameworks leverage advanced XBRL features such as:

  • Multi-dimensional modelling to reflect portfolios, counterparties, and risk categories.
  • Validation rules using XBRL Formula to ensure data integrity and regulatory consistency.
  • XBRL reporting templates designed to represent the business-user-friendly view of a report, aligning with how users typically understand supervisory reports.
  • Strict taxonomy versioning to manage ongoing updates and legislative changes.

By using XBRL in prudential reporting, authorities have been able to streamline data collection, reduce inconsistencies across entities, and enable more effective supervisory analysis.

Tax Reporting

XBRL is increasingly used in tax-related disclosures, enabling structured, machine-readable data submissions that improve accuracy, automation, and regulatory oversight.

Many countries have integrated XBRL into their national tax reporting systems. In the United Kingdom, the tax authority (HMRC) mandates the use of Inline XBRL (iXBRL) for corporate tax returns, allowing human-readable reports to be processed automatically. In Germany, the e-Bilanz system has required companies to submit annual financial statements in XBRL for tax purposes since 2011, using standardised taxonomies maintained by XBRL Germany.

Energy and Infrastructure Reporting

XBRL has expanded beyond traditional financial and regulatory reporting to support infrastructure and utility sector disclosures, particularly in highly regulated environments such as energy markets.

In the United States, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has adopted XBRL-based reporting for regulated energy companies. Since 2021, FERC requires filers to submit quarterly and annual reports in XBRL format using taxonomies specifically designed for the sector. These taxonomies include physical units such as megawatt-hours (MWh) and British thermal units (BTUs). Where a unit is not already defined in the standard, it may be added and shared for reuse, demonstrating XBRL’s extensible design.

In another innovative application, the Netherlands is using XBRL to boost utility and trust in real estate valuation reports. These implementations demonstrate XBRL’s adaptability to sector-specific reporting needs, enabling automated validation, greater transparency, and more efficient regulatory analysis.

These implementation demonstrates XBRL’s adaptability to sector-specific reporting needs, enabling automated validation, greater transparency, and more efficient regulatory analysis.

Sustainability and ESG Reporting

As sustainability becomes a central concern in corporate reporting, XBRL has proven capable of supporting structured Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) disclosures. Unlike traditional financial reporting, ESG information often relies on narrative content, scenario-based metrics, and qualitative indicators, which present unique challenges for standardisation and validation.

Two major frameworks have adopted XBRL to enable digital ESG reporting:

The International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB), under the IFRS Foundation, has developed the IFRS S1 and S2 standards, with accompanying XBRL taxonomies. These standards focus on general sustainability disclosures (S1) and climate-related information (S2), requiring detailed scenario modelling, dimensional reporting, and the use of boolean elements to represent policy choices, thresholds, and governance mechanisms.

The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) has an XBRL taxonomy for sustainability, enabling organisations to tag non-financial information and improve comparability of environmental and social performance indicators. The taxonomy supports both narrative disclosures and quantitative metrics.

As regulatory priorities evolve, many countries are expanding the use of XBRL beyond traditional financial reporting. In Colombia, for example, the Superintendencia de Sociedades introduced an XBRL taxonomy in 2025 to assess how supervised entities are aligning with good practices in sustainability. This taxonomy integrates indicators from multiple international frameworks and supports evidence-based policymaking by enabling the structured, digital analysis of ESG adoption across the corporate sector.

These taxonomies exemplify how XBRL is evolving to accommodate non-financial domains, offering a robust and flexible foundation for the growing global demand for digital ESG data.

Open and Closed Reporting

Reporting environments can be classified as being “closed”, where the set of data points to be reported is fully prescribed by the report collector, or “open”, where reporting requirements are expressed as a set of rules or principles, rather than a prescribed template. XBRL supports both types of reporting: it can enforce fixed templates for structured, closed reporting, or it can enable flexible, principle-based disclosures through its extensibility and entity-specific report presentation features. Read more about these in this guidance document.

Reporting Environments

Open Reporting Environments

Open reporting environments are characterised by reporting requirements that are defined through rules or principles, rather than a strict form or template. In these contexts, the preparer is responsible for determining both the content to be reported and its visual presentation — allowing for flexibility and variability in entity-specific disclosures.

This approach is especially suitable for narrative-rich documents such as annual reports or sustainability statements, where the layout and explanatory content play a critical role. Preparers must ensure compliance with the applicable reporting principles (e.g., IFRS or ISSB standards), but they are not restricted to predefined structures.

The recommended XBRL format for use in open reporting is Inline XBRL (iXBRL), which enables the embedding of XBRL tags within a human-readable HTML document. This allows a single report to simultaneously meet the needs of both regulatory systems (via structured data) and external stakeholders (via readable presentation and unique design).

Closed Reporting Environments

Closed reporting environments are defined by highly structured reporting requirements, where the data to be submitted is fully prescribed by the report collector. These environments are comparable to traditional forms: the collector defines all expected data points in advance, and the preparer’s task is to populate each predefined field.

In this model, there is minimal flexibility for the preparer to introduce entity-specific content or to alter the presentation. While some repetition (such as multiple rows in a table) may be permitted, the structure, layout, and required elements are fixed and governed by the collector.

Closed environments are typically used in regulatory contexts that prioritise standardisation, automation, and comparability, especially when dealing with large volumes of uniform data across many reporting entities.

The recommended XBRL formats for use in closed reporting environments are:

  • xBRL-XML: The traditional XBRL format, defined in the XBRL 2.1 specification, designed for detailed and structured machine-readable submissions.
  • xBRL-CSV: A lightweight and efficient format ideal for high-volume, tabular data and commonly used in statistical or supervisory reporting.
  • xBRL-JSON: A JSON-based syntax that simplifies data processing in modern web-based environments.

Read more about selecting an XBRL report format in this guidance.

Summary

XBRL is a flexible, domain-agnostic standard that has evolved far beyond its origins in financial reporting. Today, it supports a wide array of disclosure types, including prudential supervision, tax filings, sustainability and ESG disclosures, and even energy and infrastructure reporting. This adaptability stems from XBRL’s architecture, which separates the technical framework from domain-specific content, allowing authorities and standard setters to define their own concepts, validation rules, and report structures.

XBRL enables both closed and open reporting models. In closed environments, common in regulatory and supervisory contexts, the structure and content of reports are predefined, ensuring standardisation. In contrast, open environments allow for principle-based, narrative-rich disclosures, such as those found in annual and sustainability reports.