A majority of U.S. public companies that plan to file their financial statements in eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) are actively preparing to do so and have at least a basic knowledge of the extensible business reporting language, according to a survey by the AICPA and XBRL US.

The “XBRL Preparedness Survey,” conducted online in November found that 93 percent of the 215 respondents (90% of whom work for U.S. public companies), had at least a basic knowledge and 73 percent have begun preparation.

That is good news, especially given that many of the companies represented in the survey are not yet required to file in XBRL under the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) mandate, according to Ami Beers, Business Reporting, Assurance & Advisory Services and XBRL manager at the AICPA.

“People are starting to learn about XBRL and not waiting until the 11th hour,” she said. “They’re getting ready. They know it will take time.”

It’s not unusual to see companies take 120 hours or more to get up to speed for their first submission, but that time is greatly reduced on the second round of filing, Beers said.

Of the 25 percent of survey respondents who had already submitted XBRL-formatted financial statements to the SEC, 57 percent said it took their organizations more than 120 hours to prepare for XBRL adoption for the first time, including getting educated about XBRL in general and the SEC mandate specifically, choosing a vendor for instance creation software for in-house preparation, including software training, or choosing a third-party service provider.

On the second round of filings, 37percent of those respondents took less than 20 hours to prepare; 27 percent took 20 to 40 hours and only six percent took more than 120. Additionally, 45 percent of respondents said the preparation process was “significantly easier” than the first time.

Detailed tagging of footnotes remains a challenge, however, with 21 percent of respondents saying they need more information on how to do this. Beers attributes this to the fact that no one has been required to do this type of tagging yet and therefore best practices have not been made available.

This article has been excerpted from the Journal of Accountancy. View the full article here.