Business Reporting Language - A Survey With The Albanian Companies And Institutions

Financial reporting is a crucial element in providing long term success to a business or an institution. As the need for faster, safer, more accurate and reliable information is increasing with rapid pace, the companies are exploring innovative technological tools to provide such kind of information. One of the newest concepts which have already gained credibility amongst business environment is the Extensible Business Reporting Language, XBRL. This is a tool that allows a certain company a multi-platform reporting and that may overcome the much debated problems of information format compatibility among different companies or different industries. XBRL is already endorsed in a lot of countries worldwide and, the International Financial Accounting Federation has for several years now, included this concept in its agenda. Through this paper we try to analyze the current status of XBRL in Albania, and to give an overview of how much this concept is known by the accountants and auditors in our country. We conduct a survey to collect their opinions and we find that they mostly get information about new concept in accounting and/or auditing from after graduating studies than from professional trainings offered by the accounting/auditing associations. We also find that the respondents consider XBRL to have a lot of potential benefits but they also know it may be too costly to be implemented by the companies they work with. Regarding the current status of XBRL in Albania, we find that none of the companies, organizations or institutions has started to implement or plan to do it in the near future.