The Gartner report counseled companies to "monitor the market closely for developments in technologies that embed XBRL into business applications."

Asked to respond to Laux's and Van Decker's comments, James Fisher, SAP's senior director of solution marketing for enterprise performance management, wrote in an e-mail: "Aside from regulatory reporting, there are essentially no legal requirements for management reporting. This is a likely reason why XBRL adoption outside of financial statements is low. With SAP BusinessObjects XBRL Publishing, users can tag any data from any part of SAP, and create taxonomies as needed for internal reporting purposes."

Oracle, also asked to comment, did not respond by press time.

Meanwhile, a Gartner survey of 256 companies portrayed the low demand: less than 5% said they currently plan to use XBRL for internal reporting purposes. About half of the surveyed companies were privately held, and they were even less likely to report interest in internal usage, Van Decker says, though he notes that the benefits would be equal for public and private entities.

Even for public companies, the benefits would be more recognized if they took on the task of implementing XBRL for purposes of their public filings themselves, rather than outsourcing it to their financial-statement publishers, according to Van Decker. "I think public firms that are actively involved in XBRL projects will see the advantages for management reporting," he says, "but if they just let the publisher handle it, they won't see that opportunity." About 90 of the 100 firms in the SEC's voluntary adoption program took the outsourcing route, according to the Gartner report.

But Van Decker adds that he suspects demand will start to rise as business growth returns and more funding for new projects becomes available. If a few companies were to establish themselves as pioneers with models for implementation that could be emulated, adoption levels would rise dramatically, he suggests. "We need more examples like Nevada," he says.

Escape from Hell
Nevada's Wallin referred to the state's initiative using XBRL to streamline its debt collection, which is still in test mode, as its "spreadsheet from hell project." And, she noted, "every company has some spreadsheet hell."

State agencies turn over debts they can't collect to Wallin's office for transmittal to outside debt collectors. Historically, the information was provided on Excel spreadsheets, but in many different formats. "We had 71 different spreadsheets in the debt-collection area alone," she said.

So the controller's office would have to cut and paste data from certain spreadsheet cells into a master, single-format spreadsheet. Then as payments were received the process would have to be done in reverse, with information on the payments cut and pasted back into spreadsheets in the formats used by the individual agencies. "It was a lot of work and fraught with reconciliation issues, and also internal-control issues because we were manually manipulating the data," said Wallin.

The XBRL project is eliminating all of that, she said. Spreadsheets from the state agencies containing debt data are tagged and sent to a repository containing a debt-collection taxonomy. From there, Wallin's staff can generate XBRL-tagged reports on the debts and send the reports to the debt-collection agencies, which send back payment data on the same XBRL-tagged reports.

Data tagging is being used similarly to improve the reporting on state grants, which also formerly involved a laborious process of manually entering and cutting and pasting information.

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