XBRL: The Future of Financial Reporting in Jordan

Abstract

The world in general and the sharing of data in particular becomes more and more digital each day. And the need for information increases, as well as the number of people who use data for their processes. These developments require an open, transparent and easy to use mechanism in order to make sure that everybody ‘speaks the same language’. XBRL provides this mechanism.
The objective of this research is to investigate the perspectives of faculty members in Jordanian Universities on the benefits and obstacles that may be generated from the adoption of XBRL in the future in Jordanian organizations and business sector.
Our results show that, according to the academic‘s perspectives, several benefits and advantages of the adoption of the XBRL such as facilitating comparison, communication, and analysis of financial reports, transparency, quality, and reduce the cost of producing financial reports, company’s technological reputation, supporting research and consultation, compatibility with other accounting applications, communication with regulatory authorities, and strengthening the value of information. However, more practically, we also look at the negative part of online financial reports. Problems arise when adopting XBRL, several obstacles and trend on implementing XBRL are also estimated, such as the lack of experts in the field of XBRL appears to be the main stumbling block to more widespread adoption of the technology by businesses, other obstacles to the adoption of XBRL, include the need for additional software and hardware components, lack of feedback on this emerging technology, time and effort needed to learn XBRL, and the lack of sources available to deal with XBRL.