ESEF iXBRL Reporting – Scope and Tagging Requirements

iXBRL Reporting – Scope and Tagging Requirements

Introduction to iXBRL Reporting

ESMA requires all public listed companies (referred to as issuers in this blog) to submit their Annual Financial Reports (AFR) in a new format named Inline XBRL (iXBRL). This new format replaces the PDF submissions with the national regulator.

Scope

Issuers are required to submit their full AFR in iXBRL format with the tagging obligation covering the following

• Detailed tagging of Financial Statements (from 2020)
• Block tagging for notes (from 2022)
• Detailed tagging of notes (voluntary)

Companies are required to tag every number in the Primary Financial Statements in the 1^st phase of the mandate. (Please note that when submitting the AFR, the entire document needs to be submitted. Within the document, all disclosures in the Financial Statements need to be mapped to appropriate tags from the ESEF taxonomy.

Eg: Below is an extract of an Income Statement of a Company.

The Company is required to map each concept reported in the above statement with the appropriate element in the ESEF taxonomy.

Eg: Sales and net reported in the AFR need to be mapped to the element ‘Revenue’ present in the ESEF taxonomy. This element is present in the link 310000 – Statement of Comprehensive Income, profit or loss, by the function of expense.

Sales on Left Hand Side is Mapped to Revenue on Right Hand Side

Below are the properties of the element ‘Revenues’ in the ESEF taxonomy.

Let’s quickly walk through each of the properties – Data Type, Balance Type, and Period Type.

The taxonomy itself defines the nature of the element – I,e monetary, shares, percentage, etc (referred to as Data Type). For monetary items, there are attributes to indicate whether an element is ‘debit’ or ‘credit’ (referred to as Balance Type) and whether an element is reported on a particular date (instant) or over a period of time (duration) (referred to as Period Type).

In this example, the disclosure ‘Revenue’ which the company has reported in its Consolidated Income Statement needs to be mapped to IFRS-full-Revenue in the taxonomy.

The company is required to follow the same process for all elements in the statement. If there are disclosures present in the Income Statement where elements cannot be found from the Statement of Comprehensive Income – profit or loss link, but are available in other links, Companies are encouraged to use those. In other words, companies are required to use elements from the ESEF taxonomy to the best extent possible.

In cases where companies have disclosures that do not find a corresponding element in the ESEF taxonomy at all, companies are required to create ‘company-specific extension elements’ to accommodate such disclosures. Stay tuned for our next blog which will give you a complete overview of what extensions are and how to create them. ixbrl report