To answer your questions, youll need to evaluate specific account values or financial statement paragraphs. As an analyst, you have access to the Securities and Exchange Commissions (SECs) EDGAR database of XBRL financial statements as well as a list of XBRL tags from the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB). XBRL stands for eXtensible Business Reporting Language and is used to make the data in financial statements machine-readable. Public companies have been preparing XBRL reports since 2008. While there are some issues with XBRL data, such data have become a useful means for comparing and analyzing financial statements. Every value, date, and paragraph is tagged with a label that identifies what each specific value represents, similar to assigning attributes in a database. Because companies tag their financial statements with XBRL tags, you can use those tags to identify specific data that you need to answer your questions.