XBRL awareness required: Does your company need to file AFS in iXBRL with CIPC?

From 1 July 2018, CIPC (Companies and Intellectual Property Commission) mandated that all qualifying entities in South Africa must submit their Annual Financial Statements (AFS) in iXBRL with their annual returns. Yet, many companies are still unaware of the mandate.

Inline XBRL or iXBRL, which can be read by both machines and humans, is an updated form of XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language). It’s enhancing the electronic generation of financial information that is to be filed with regulators across the globe. It offers maximum benefit in the analysis, preparation and communication of business information. The implementation of XBRL has definitively improved the accuracy and reliability of the data submitted to regulators.

XBRL also improves operational efficiency and effective regulation, decreasing the need for human intervention and for manual calculations which are normally prone to errors and could lead to missing facts in financial statements.

In South Africa, CIPC has set forth a few criteria that if an entity meets, it will be required to file its AFS in iXBRL.

• If the entity is a private/personal liability company and has an aggregated value of assets (held at anytime during the financial year) exceeding R5 million.
• If the entity has an MOI (Memorandum of Incorporation) that denotes filing of audited financial statements.
• If the entity has a Public Interest Score (PIS) of 350 or more and an independent party compiles its financial statements.
• If the entity has a Public Interest Score of 100 or more and its financial statements are compiled

Other than entities and private companies that meet these qualifications, all public companies, state-owned companies and non-profit entities are also required to submit their AFS in iXBRL.

However, the entities that don’t meet these requirements are not obligated by the mandate to submit their statements in iXBRL. For more detailed information regarding the iXBRL required please refer the CIPC iXBRL guide.