iXBRL (Inline XBRL)

Inline XBRL (iXBRL) is the SEC-mandated structured data format that makes financial filing data machine-readable. Since 2020, all SEC filers must embed iXBRL tags in their financial statements, wrapping each reported number — revenue, assets, share counts, trust balances — in an XML tag that identifies the concept, the reporting period, the units, and the context.

For SPAC data platforms like SpacDesk, iXBRL is transformational. Instead of parsing narrative text to find trust account balances buried in prose, the extraction pipeline can query the structured tags directly. Key SPAC-relevant iXBRL concepts include trust account value per share, shares held in trust, common stock outstanding, working capital, and various liability line items for warrants and earnout obligations.

The quality of iXBRL tagging varies significantly across filers. Large-cap companies with sophisticated filing agents produce well-tagged financials with custom extensions for non-standard line items. Smaller SPACs, particularly those using less experienced filing agents, may have inconsistent tagging — missing tags, incorrect concept selections, or improperly scoped contexts. SpacDesk's extraction pipeline includes validation logic to detect and flag tagging anomalies.

Beyond financial statements, the SEC has extended iXBRL requirements to cover page data — textual disclosures that are tagged with block-level identifiers. This enables automated extraction of risk factors, MD&A sections, and other narrative content, though the granularity is lower than for financial data. SpacDesk leverages both financial and block-tagged iXBRL data in its filing processing pipeline.