Meet the ESEF requirements and tag your consolidated financial statements according to IFRS!

As of 1.1.2020, all European companies issuing securities within the EU will be obliged to to implement a new challenge: The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) requires with the introduction of the new ESEF-Reporting, company reports in XHTML format or with the iXBRL-technology.

In the Final Report of ESMA of 18.12.2017 states it reads: "All annual financial reports shall be prepared in XHTML. If the annual financial report contains IFRS() consolidated financial statements, these must be marked with XBRL tags that are embedded in the XHTML document using inline XBRL technology. In the first two years, only the primary financial statements must be tagged. Thereafter, the entire IFRS (International Financial Reporting Standards) consolidated financial statements will be XBRL tagged."

In most parts of the EU area, the use of a uniform machine-readable reporting format is not yet required by law. As a result, there are numerous system breaks in the preparation of financial reports. The non-continuous data supply chain is an enormous source of errors and makes report generation laborious and inefficient. Data has to be entered and transferred by hand. The individual work steps are often repetitive. With the introduction of a uniform European solution for digital financial reporting, the situation will change fundamentally. 

The electronically readable file format iXBRL enables the digital analysis and interpretation of financial data. This will revolutionise the way analysts and investors do their company and industry analysis. In future, regulators will be able to check reports at the touch of a button. This will lead to more transparency and optimised investor protection. In addition, the use of AI will further improve the analysis possibilities in the future. The prerequisite for this is that the data is machine-readable. 

With the new European Single Electronic Format (ESEF), the digitalisation of corporate reporting is being advanced. The aim is to optimise the availability and accessibility of corporate reports. On the basis of IFRS, an own ESEF taxonomy has already been developed, with which all standard and documentation labels are available in all languages.