Validation and Data Quality at the Forefront of Listed Companies’ Concerns for ESEF Reporting

ESEF Reporting starts in 2021 and the potential for reputational damage resulting from quality issues in the reported information is high amongst listed companies’ concerns. UBPartner has therefore concentrated the latest release of its leading XBRL software on mitigating these risks by fully supporting ESMA’s ESEF Reporting Manual and the ESEF Conformance Suite.

UBPartner (www.ubpartner.com), one of the real experts in XBRL systems and a leading provider of XBRL technology and tools, announced today the availability of the latest version of its XBRL Processing Engine (XPE 2020-1). This follows the successful completion of extensive testing of XPE’s compliance with the European Single Electronic Format (ESEF) Filing Rules manual and review against the latest version of the ESEF Conformance Suite.

Listed companies, financial application providers and financial consultants will be able to use the software to ensure that the ESEF reports that they generate are 100% compliant with the required standards, whilst also ensuring that the financial data provided is accurate and consistent.

“The new ESEF reporting framework goes live at the beginning of 2021 for most European listed companies. The technical standards published by the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) require that a company’s annual report be published in inline XBRL, often called iXBRL. This new format combines a standard xHTML document that can be read using any browser with XBRL ‘tags’ that enable computer systems to extract and analyse the financial data. This, plus the need to tailor the IFRS XBRL taxonomy to their own reporting needs, will significantly increase the demands placed upon listed companies, their accounting advisors, and auditors to ensure that the financial data provided is correct,” observed Roger Haddad, UBPartner, President and chairperson of the XBRL Europe Best Practices Task Force.

“As discovered in earlier, similar XBRL reporting frameworks, such as the US SEC, it is critical that quality is built into the system at the beginning and not retrofitted afterward. Poor quality submissions can cause reputational damage to the issuing firms and raise alarms in the wider investor community. UBPartner has therefore centered its software development efforts on validation and tools that allow companies to embed quality checks into each step of the reporting process.”

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XPE at the forefront of ESEF Adoption

XPE has often led the way in supporting new XBRL standards, hence its deployment as a core component of some of the largest and most complex XBRL reporting frameworks to date. Worldwide both regulators and filers in countries such as Italy, Ireland, China, South Korea, Mexico, and Canada are using XPE to validate and process annual sets of accounts.

XPE is also the underlying technology for the UBPartner XBRL Toolkit (XT) which is used by over 500 European banks generating CRD4 reports and Insurance firms that file Solvency 2 reports. XT has also been extended to support ESEF reporting and is already being used by partners to test the ESEF reporting process and to generate initial ESEF extension Taxonomies and iXBRL documents for leading European firms.

“We believe that quality should be central to any ESEF reporting process, as the risks of getting it significantly wrong for publicly listed companies is high. We are working as part of XBRL Europe and its Best Practices Task Force to improve the guidance in the ESEF filing rules and the ESEF Conformance Suite. We are also working tirelessly to help our partners to develop a set of processes to help issuers ensure that quality is built in from the start,” stated David Bell, Chief Technology Officer at UBPartner and member of XBRL Standards Working Groups, “XPE plays a major part in validating both the ESEF Taxonomy Extension and the inline XBRL document at each step in the reporting process.”

“Many listed companies still view the report as just an electronic version of a printed paper document. But XBRL is much more than that and opens the door for investors to exploit the tagged information in so many different ways, in addition to the simple accessibility via a web browser. Our development goal is to hide the power of XPE and XBRL behind a set of easy-to-use applications and familiar tools like Microsoft Office to generate a 100% valid report final report.”