Understanding the Role and Significance of iXBRL Filing with the CIPC.

It’s been over two years since iXBRL was mandated in South Africa. However, some companies still have their reservations about iXBRL and see it only as an added compliance burden. What these businesses fail to comprehend is that iXBRL is not a mere reporting tool; it’s much more than that. By standardizing the entire reporting format and accurately tagging accounts, it makes analysing financial data much easier and efficient.

Reasons behind the Adoption of iXBRL

The reason why CIPC backed the adoption of iXBRL is primarily to make financial data more transparent, manageable, and presentable to investors, analysts, and regulators. This move from the CIPC was taken to leverage the innumerable advantages the format offers like:-

● Reducing the administrative load on businesses

● Improving transparency and analysis capacity

● Reducing the burden for both the CIPC and the companies reporting to multiple regulatory bodies

iXBRL has replaced the old-fashioned format of reporting – the PDF format. Moving away from an unstructured PDF financial reporting format has ultimately helped reduce human error. With the PDF format, the CIPC had to examine each and every account manually. However, since the inception of iXBRL, annual financial statements can be quickly validated against the IFRS taxonomy. In retrospect, it is a validation software solution that automatically runs through the in-built taxonomy and compliance rules to check that each requirement has been adhered to.

Furthermore, another advantage of iXBRL that the CIPC noted was that it collates all the financial data into a common repository, allowing it to be processed in-depth, thereby helping the CIPC identify and track trends.

Simply put, with the introduction of iXBRL, financial data has suddenly become more useful.

Adoption of iXBRL: A Prudent Move

In a nutshell, the adoption of iXBRL was a well-thought-out move by the CIPC. It can help businesses bring together financial data and make sense of it quickly and seamlessly. However, to stay on top of the CIPC compliance requirements as well as the IFRS taxonomy, businesses need to have a robust solution in place. DataTracks, a global iXBRL solution provider, is offering a dependable and reliable solution for the conversion of financial data for reporting. What’s more, is that DataTracks continually updates its solutions to include all the latest CIPC requirements as well as the IFRS taxonomy. With DataTracks, iXBRL compliance reporting made easy and error-free.

To take your iXBRL filings up a notch and to make better sense of your financial data, speak to a DataTracks expert @ +27-10-446-9061.