Thank you so much for your excellent question.

Please keep in mind that the costs referred to above were taken from the Voluntary Filing Program (VFP), and not the SEC’s proposed mandate. The main difference for UTC and Pepsico will be that the new XBRL filings required in 2009 will need to be materially the same as the underlying SEC filings. This raises the bar on XBRL to an entirely new level. Both companies will want to spend additional time reviewing and checking their tags prior to sending same to the SEC and should consider what is the best way for their companies to accomplish correct on-time XBRL exhibits filed with the SEC.

The initial VFP was, as David Blazskowsky from the SEC’s Office of Interactive Data describes, a “sandbox with no rules”. The filers in 2009 will need to sort through a lengthy users guide and decide among 14, 000 plus tags when completing the task for real which will add additional cost and time to the process. Late filers with respect to the XBRL schedules will be considered “late” by the SEC. The VFP carries no penalties whatsoever.

Additionally, the authors of this blog are not affiliated with Hitachi America. Our viewpoints are solely our own.

In the book published by your company “XBRL for Dummies”

Chapter 4, Examining the Challenges of XBRL, in that there is a sub point titled, “Price of Tagging” in it there are couple of examples given, following examples I would like to quote;-

1) United Technologies, a Company having sales of 43 Billion Dollars, in Sales. Spent $40,000, Dollars to convert its first 10Q, it is further even mentioned, that the company has chosen to purchase its own application for conversion. Now going by the example, it seems that cost of conversion is not too high, as said by you. For integrated approach, sir you have mentioned that initial investment may be high. But it doesnt look that high.

2) PepsiCo’s example given in the same book, says, they outsourced the work, and it costed Pepsico, $ 5000 for its initial filing.

Now going by above two examples, is it really going to be costly sir, for companies to comply with XBRL?

I agree that for outsourced approach, it has got its own limitations as rightly pointed out by you.

The companies, that would be required to file XBRLised returns as per SEC Mandate, are going to be very big companies i.e. Their worldwide public float should be above $5 billion. I believe cost is not going to be a factor for them.