Ince on the cutting edge of iXBRL
Published - 18 May, 2018
Ince attended a CIPC workshop held on 26 March 2018, where all CIPC approved XBRL Software Service Providers (SSP), and CIPC’s appointed taxonomy service provider BR-AG, reviewed all aspects of the current taxonomy model.
BR-AG and CIPC confirmed that excluding any functionality changes that might arise from current testing, no further changes to the taxonomy were expected this year before “Go Live” on 1 July 2018. BR-AG then presented their rationale and plans to upgrade the taxonomy to include more recent releases of IFRS and iXBRL standards, as well as extend it to be more inclusive of local reporting requirements, such as BEE and JSE regulations. These items will be fully investigated and included in an updated taxonomy for the 1 July 2019 reporting cycle. CIPC also confirmed that no taxonomy extensions are allowed.
With the objective of XBRL being to reduce the costs and administrative burden and improve transparency when reporting, we at Ince, identified that achieving these goals requires reducing duplication and inconsistency in reported information to various institutions. The published IAR must be reproduced on the world-wide-web and reported in XBRL – “there is only one version of the truth”. Our journey towards achieving this objective, allowed Ince to revoloutionise our processes in terms of our one-stop software solutions, by creating our own locally developed and supported XBRL software. We are planning to gain international accreditation from XBRL before the end of the year.
Ince has successfully participated in the CIPC XBRL Pilot Programme and now moved seamlessly into a “live” production phase, in facilitating current submissions for multiple entities and their subsidiaries.
Some of our learnings gained so far have been compiled using the “Frequently Asked Questions” strategy (as well as the CIPC website) and below are some of the most pertinent summarised answers.
The first date for XBRL submission for every entity is determined by the anniversary date of their date of incorporation. The calculation of the first date of submission of an entity is different for close corporations and companies.
Entities are required to submit their latest final approved audited or independently reviewed Annual Financial Statements together with their Annual Returns, on the same day as their Annual Returns. The first date of submissions via XBRL, will be the first date of submission that falls on or after 1 July 2018, irrespective of the year of their latest final approved audited or independently reviewed Annual Financial Statements.
Holding Companies must submit their Total Consolidated Group (including Holding plus all local and overseas subsidiaries) and their own separate Holding Company results in the same instance file, which will be filed against the Holding company Registration number.
Each South African Registered subsidiary of their group, that currently qualifies to submit their PFS in PDF with their AR, will need to do so in iXBRL from 1.7.2018, against their own Company Registration number.
It is only the mechanism of submission, that has changed from PDF of AFS to iXBRL. So, the PI Score does come into it, but in the same way as it always has done.
XBRL expresses financial information in a clear, strictly defined, worldwide standards based, granular way, to enable computerised transmission, compilation and analysis of large amounts of data which produces meaningful, individually tailored, reports for multiple management and informational consumption purposes.
In XBRL , financial values are expressed as plain numeric characters with a specific accounting label/name that carries a specific “weighting”. It is that label with its attribute of + or – which defines the figure as a plus or minus (Debit/Credit) in the calculation linkbase. i.e. XBRL does not express numbers in brackets to indicate a minus function.