From Rich Design PDF to Rich Design XHTML
DataTracks participated in the 24th XBRL Europe Day held at the Chamber of Commerce in Milan, Italy. The event had more than 200 attendees, including some of the leading names in the academic world, industry experts, regulators, audit firms, design firms, and Issuers. The focus of the event was to discuss recent trends in regulatory reporting, especially within the European Union and the UK. XBRL is one of the foremost languages used in financial reporting, and the meeting discussed various advancements in the field of XBRL.
The highlight of the conference was on European Single Electronic Format (ESEF), an upcoming regulation in the EU that mandates all publicly listed companies in the EU & UK to prepare their annual financial report (AFR) in XHTML format from January 2020 onwards. Furthermore, if the annual financial report has consolidated financial statements prepared using IFRS, then the financial statements should be tagged with XBRL elements, as per the ESEF taxonomy to make it machine-readable. The resulting output would be an Inline XBRL document.
Business Enterprises Expectation:
Business enterprises in the European Union have been producing their AFRs for investors in PDF with a high level of design and image content. After the announcement & roll out of the ESEF mandate, the corporate world expects to make their submissions in XHTML or Inline XBRL format by maintaining the high design content that was already available in their PDF’s. This is an industry-wide challenge at present, and Issuers were keen to know of any solutions that would enable them to generate Inline XBRL documents by maintaining all their original design aspects. Meeting this challenge would be the key to have a single document of reference, for both machine readability and the print media.
Knowledge sessions to shed more light on the objective of the conference:
DataTracks, known for its regulatory reporting and disclosure management solutions services, made a use-case presentation to address this key challenge. During the event, DataTracks gave a detailed insight on the conversion from “Rich Design PDF to Rich Design XHTML” and offered practical suggestions to make submissions in XHTML format possible along with the design elements. Furthermore, rich design PDF files can directly be loaded into the Rainbow™ platform and converted to XHTML. XBRL tagging can be performed on the XHTML content using the drag-and-drop feature available in the Rainbow™. As a result, valid Inline XBRL documents can be generated, which would be a perfect replacement for the original PDF’s used in paper-based submissions.
In addition to the above, DataTracks showcased sample ESEF compliant outputs that are exact conversions of the original high design PDFs. The outputs were in inline XBRL format and generated with its newly fitted design module, minimizing the efforts in complying with the new set of requirements.
The response to DataTracks’ presentation was over-whelming. John Turner, CEO XBRL International, tweeted, “Really good to see the amazing progress made by@ DataTracks and a number of other vendors, enabling the shift from #paper2data with Inline XBRL documents that contain machine-readable fundamental data while preserving the strong design used in traditional annual reports.”
About Rainbow™:
Rainbow™ is a product developed by DataTracks and has been used for over a decade in creating XBRL and Inline XBRL reports for several publicly listed companies in the US, UK, and South Africa. Rainbow™ eases the reporting of annual financial report in iXBRL format (XHTML document with supporting linkbase files). Our state-of-the-art, single-source platform supports multiple use cases. A simple clip-on solution that reads high-design PDF and converts into XHTML facilitates XBRL tagging and generates iXBRL by retaining the same high-design elements of PDF. A comprehensive platform that facilitates easy, collaborative preparation of pre-design annual financial report through multiple input methods, including integration with data sources.
DataTracks have experience of preparing over 75,000 iXBRL filings with HMRC, and over 20,000 XBRL reports with the SEC. To implement ESEF reporting in your company using iXBRL or to get further clarity on the subject, you can connect with a regulatory reporting expert like DataTracks at enquiry@datatracks.eu, or you can give us a call on +31 (0) 20 2253 702.
About DataTracks:
DataTracks, Singapore, is a global leader in disclosure management software. DataTracks serves 17,000 business enterprises in 24 countries. DataTracks software and services have been used to prepare more than 180,000 compliance reports so far for filing with regulators such as SEC in the United States, ESMA, EBA and EIOPA in European Union, HMRC in the United Kingdom, ACRA in Singapore, SSM in Malaysia, CIPC in South Africa and MCA in India.