Morningstar, an investment research and investment management firm headquartered in Chicago, provides data on approximately 525,000 investment offerings, and began collecting data in XBRL format in 2012, starting with data from Taiwan and Japan. In 2016 they began working with US-based corporate data in XBRL format and will be making this available to clients in 2017.
Morningstar’s Head of Fundamentals, Equity Data Operations, Jo Guo noted that “Using XBRL has increased our productivity and efficiency … We are able to process each filing within 1-2 minutes, and provide our clients with more timely data.”
Before
Data extracted out of HTML filings takes at least 20 minutes to process. Data from good quality PDF filings takes approximately 30 minutes to process. And data from image documents requires about 50 minutes to process before the data can be used.
After
Financial statement data formatted using the XBRL data standard only takes about 1-2 minutes of processing time – a 90-95% reduction in processing time versus HTML documents.
Conclusion
Data standards can improve efficiencies and reduce labor costs by at least 90%.
