As part of the regulatory and supervisory functions bestowed on it, the Reserve Bank of India collects various fixed format data (called ‘Returns’) from commercial banks, financial institutions, authorised dealers and non-banking financial institutions. Many of these returnsare statutory under the Reserve Bank of India Act 1934, Banking Regulation Act 1949, Foreign Exchange Management Act 1999, etc. Submission frequency of these returns may be daily, weekly, fortnightly, monthly, quarterly, half-yearly or annual.

The conventional methods of returns submission follow traditional and non-web based modes of communication, viz., hard copies sent through postal service, faxes and PDF files sent through e-mails. All these modes of filing returns have their own limitations. Hence a need was felt for developing a single electronic returns submission window – thus came the Online Return Filing System (ORFS). As a part of the online filing of returns, the Reserve bank of India felt the need for the adoption of the best international technology solution. Thus Reserve Bank of India adopted eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL), which attempts the standardisation of business reporting, especially financial reporting. While ORFS brings no standardisation across the returns, XBRL is capable of implementing global standards across all returns. The effort is towards building a taxonomy for the entire financial sector, irrespective of the financial segments. This website hosts online submission of returns, both through ORFS and XBRL. This co-exist with other conventional forms of return submission. Error OccuredThere was no endpoint listening at http://wcfrbienglish/Service.svc that could accept the message. This is often caused by an incorrect address or SOAP action. See InnerException, if present, for more details.

XBRL stands for eXtensible Business Reporting Language. It is a language for the electronic communication of business and financial data which is revolutionising the business reporting around the world. It offers major benefits to all those who have to create, transmit, use or analyse such business information. Some of the benefits of using XBRL include cost savings, greater efficiency, improved accuracy and eliability to all those involved in supplying or using financial data.

The basic idea behind XBRL is that instead of treating financial information as a block of text or numeric items, a unique electronically readable tag is attached to each individual financial term. It is not just the data or text that floats around, these individual items move along with an electronic tag. Thus, it is not just the ‘content’ but also the ‘context’ is being transmitted. It is one of a family of ‘XML’ languages which is becoming a standard means of communicating information between businesses and on the Internet.