The XBRL GL Core is the foundation for developing modular add-ons. The Core itself can represent the basics in a chart of accounts, customer, vendor, employee, inventory, job and other master files BASICS, open receivables and payables, and journal detail to be delivered to a GL (aka Luca Pacioli's account/amount/date and Dr=Cr). The Core is approximately 50 data fields.

Modular add-ons are also being developed (and looking for experts to flesh them out) for accounting specifics which may differ in different jurisdictions (US differs from France differs from Japan) and different areas of business (transaction detail for tracking stocks differs from AT&T tracking phone calls differs from banking detailed transactions.)

XBRL will not compete at the full transaction level - you will find XML efforts for customer orders and purchase orders from groups like BASDA (www.basda.org) or EDI groups that will meet that need. But XBRL will be able to represent those once they have reached classification (to a GL account, a performance measurement category or some other "bucket") for tracking and providing the drill-down from the GL reporting. Watchhttp://www.xbrl.org/gl/gl.htm for more information!