As the effective date approaches for the last and largest wave of public companies to begin submitting their financial statements in XBRL, resources are rolling out to help companies at all stages of XBRL adoption.

XBRL is the new data-interactive method that public companies are required to follow to submit their financial statements to the Securities and Exchange Commission. To do so, they must follow the 2011 taxonomy for Generally Accepted Accounting Principles that provides a roadmap for how to plot the various pieces of data and disclosures into the XBRL architecture. The largest public companies are entering their third phase of XBRL submissions while the smallest companies will face their first required XBRL submissions for any reporting periods that end after June 15.

For companies still trying to get their arms around how to use the GAAP taxonomy to complete XBRL filings, the Financial Accounting Standards Board is offering a one-hour webcast to explain the taxonomy's search and navigation functions. Companies must get familiar with those functions to select the right tags to match their specific financial data and disclosures.

The webcast will address considerations for tag selections, understanding tag relationships and how to use the various network views, and how to find certain types of tags quickly. It also will address advanced search and shared search functions to find the right tags, finding tags using the Accounting Standards Codification, and several other key functionality features of the tag selection process.

For more advanced XBRL users, companies that perhaps are entering their second or third round of XBRL submissions, the consortium XBRL US has published a Corporate Actions Taxonomy that can be used to report various corporate action announcements and events through XBRL. The taxonomy is a collection of some data tags aligned with the elements of the global ISO 20022 standards for reporting corporate actions.

It contains 550 base elements covering 94 types of events compared with 18,000 elements in the GAAP taxonomy. The Corporate Actions Taxonomy is meant to enable public companies to ensure that the words used to describe their corporate actions are reported directly to consumers of the information with the exact same meanings throughout the communications process.

Finally, the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants has published an exposure draft to suggest some principles and criteria for preparers, reviewers, and practitioners to use when evaluating or analyzing information reported in XBRL. The draft was developed and proposed by the XBRL Assurance Task Force of the AICPA's Assurance Services Executive Committee.

While XBRL-submitted data is not subject to an audit requirement by the SEC, that reprieve is widely expected to be lifted as companies get more familiar with the submission process. The ASEC guidance maps out some proposed principles and criteria that auditors or others might consider when evaluating XBRL-submitted information. The draft is open for comment through July 15.