The XBRL Global Ledger Taxonomy Framework (XBRL GL) is a holistic and generic XML and XBRL-based representation of the detailed data that can be found in accounting and operational systems, and is meant to be the bridge from transactional standards to reporting standards, integrating the Business Reporting Supply Chain.
The instance documents (XML files) can also be viewed in Web browsers using XSL or programmatically; it can also be carried in Inline XBRL.
XBRL GL can support the detail and integrate to all manners of reporting, financial, tax, sustainability, statistics and otherwise, and carry both quantitative and qualitative information.
UN/CEFACT is UML (Unified Modeling Language)-based, with standard naming and design rules to convert it to an XML file format.
Due to the needs of the tax community in many countries, the Standard Audit File is generic, but an example of a proprietary XML format is provided.
Tax regulations also make huge differences in the actual content of accounting and financial report information between countries.
The EU commission has spent large efforts into the field of tax administrative harmonisation and for instance is the main intention latest version of the EU VAT directive to achieve this and to support electronic trade documents like electronic invoices better in cross border trade especially within the European Union Value Added Tax Area.
Another problem is the EU government procurement regulations in demands of standards organisations specifications, of recognition of the private market efforts from many initiatives being made so far.
UN/CEFACT is an official UN standards organisation, but UN/CEFACT have big problems finalizing its project and few if any, understand the general idea on how to apply UN/CEFACT accounting, UN/CEFACT(EDIFICAS) being asked can't/don't tell.
And without support of the information producers there will be no data for the analysers and audits in XBRL GL format, and so no market for commercial software for them either.
The lack of accounting integration is also the most likely reason for electronic invoice formats still having very low market penetration and progress is slow.
Mainly because the electronic invoice formats are not in first place designed for accounting and VAT legislation demands, but in unregulated trade document perspectives.
The contradiction between standards organisation ethics and applied technology (a common implementation instruction set) issues, is a hard thing to solve to make such projects more successful.
All other (national, future and international) vendors in the domestic Swedish accounting related commercial software market had to, by customer demand, follow the standard to sell any volumes.
Actually the existence of the common format showed the market very good arguments for the data producing users real strong benefits.
It is interesting to note that the starting vision of SIE was about the same as XBRL, export accounting data to tax declaration commercial software.
But it is possible to find special benefit points data for producers, and by it make them pay to get the features of the accounting standard file format, but it is a hard commercial design issue.
As such it has gained interest from many sectors, including tax administrators in OASIS (organization) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).