XBRL

XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) is an XML-based markup language designed specifically for financial reporting. The SEC requires all public companies to tag their financial statements with XBRL taxonomies, which assign standardized labels to each financial line item. For example, revenue is tagged as "us-gaap:Revenues" regardless of whether the company calls it "Net Revenue," "Total Revenue," or "Net Sales" in their filing. This standardization is what makes large-scale financial analysis possible. Without XBRL, comparing revenue across 500 companies would require manually reading each filing and mapping their unique terminology. With XBRL, a computer can extract the revenue figure from every S&P 500 filing in seconds. EarningsCallAI's entire data pipeline relies on XBRL-tagged data from SEC EDGAR. The XBRL taxonomy covers thousands of financial concepts organized in a hierarchy. The US-GAAP taxonomy alone contains over 17,000 elements. Companies can also create custom extensions for line items specific to their business, though this reduces comparability. The quality of XBRL tagging varies across companies, some use granular, specific tags while others use broad, generic ones. Inline XBRL (iXBRL), which embeds XBRL tags directly in human-readable HTML documents, has become the standard format since the SEC mandated its use. This means the same filing is simultaneously human-readable and machine-readable, eliminating the need for separate XBRL and HTML submissions.