With the starting month for year 2 iXBRL filing rapidly approaching, Seahorse can help you dramatically reduce the time taken to tag this years’ accounts. If you’ve already been converting documents to iXBRL using Seahorse, you can now migrate the tags from your existing accounts to the next year’s accounts, without losing any of your original tagging decisions. Seahorse will still auto-tag any remaining items not contained in the earlier document. The migrated items should already be correct from the previous year’s filing, so very few changes should be required. As a result, the review process will be shorter and the whole year 2 tagging procedure will take significantly less time now that you don’t have to start again from scratch.
As an added bonus, you can also re-use your tagging decisions to speed up the tagging of accounts for several different companies within the same corporate group.
As promised in early September, the new version of Seahorse has just been released, providing full conversion of Microsoft Excel accounts to iXBRL format, ready for HMRC Corporation Tax filing.
There’s no need to change the way you currently work. Just take your Excel accounts document and let Seahorse apply the appropriate iXBRL tags. The process replicates the same automatic tagging approach that has been so successful in the conversion of Word accounts. It also features the same ‘round-tripping’ functionality that allows you to make changes to your accounts outside Seahorse and then re-import the Excel document back into Seahorse without losing any pre-existing tags.
A fully validated iXBRL document emerges, ready for submission to HMRC as part of your CT filing.
So, don’t change your existing process. Let Seahorse simplify and streamline your tagging of Excel documents.
License Seahorse through our partners.
It’s official – Seahorse can now help you tag your Excel based accounts. The beta version of our fast, accurate Seahorse iXBRL conversion tool is now available for demonstration.
The final production version will be available later in September. The beta version shows how accounts documents created in Excel can be uploaded to Seahorse and tags applied in a similar manner to the auto-tagging of Word accounts. If you’re an existing user of the Word version of Seahorse you’ll find the workflow very familiar, including the same intelligent tag suggestion process designed to speed you through tag selection.
So, if you’re currently using Excel to create your accounts and have no wish to change your process in order to comply with HMRC’s mandate for the filing of Corporation Tax accounts in iXBRL, look no further. Seahorse provides the perfect solution for Excel users, so get in touch with one of our Seahorse partners today!
The move towards XBRL as the standard technology for regulatory filing continues to gather momentum, India being the latest country to issue a mandate. The Indian Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA) now requires all listed companies and certain unlisted companies to file their balance sheets and profit and loss accounts for the year ended 31st March 2011 in XBRL format.
The key to XBRL filing is the ability to produce XBRL instance documents as efficiently as possible. Following the success of our Seahorse accounts tagging solution in the UK market, we are updating the solution for Indian companies. Seahorse already supports the Indian taxonomy and we are currently adding a series of relevant validation rules to ensure MCA compliance.
My previous blog post talked about review sheets in Seahorse™. However, even if you’re not using Seahorse, you can still check the quality of your iXBRL documents prior to filing. Why is this important? Because even though HMRC has indicated they will not penalise filers who make best endeavours to comply with the mandate, their guidelines also state that incorrect or missing tags may in certain circumstances prompt further risk assessment and follow-up.
Enter Magnify™, our desktop document review tool. Magnify uses a checklist approach to guide you step by step through an assessment of your iXBRL document. Wherever possible it performs automated tests, verifying calculations and highlighting any discrepancies and errors. No matter whether you produce your iXBRL in-house, use the output from an accounts production package or outsource the whole process to a third party, Magnify gives you that extra peace of mind knowing that you’re submitting quality documents that will pass the HMRC gateway without issue.
So, you’ve finished tagging your iXBRL accounts, but what happens if others need to review them off-line prior to sign-off? Till now that hasn’t always been easy if senior management doesn’t have access to your tagging service. With Seahorse, it’s a problem solved.
Seahorse lets you export an Excel spreadsheet detailing every line item in your iXBRL document, showing the line item description, who tagged it, the concept label, the confidence level of the chosen tag, the suggestion ranking and whether the tag belongs within the Minimum Tagging Set. It’s particularly useful for reviewing the consistency of your work and providing an explicit audit log for your filers.
iXBRL has been a reality since April, but post-mandate it’s clear that companies are still struggling to cope with HMRC’s requirement for iXBRL filing. During a series of recent iXBRL webinars we questioned delegates about their filing plans. Many had filed early to avoid the issue – for this year at least – and others had outsourced the problem, but a significant percentage claim little understanding of iXBRL and remain ill-prepared to meet the new filing obligations. Most expressed concern about the amount of additional time they would need to spend on the conversion process.
Mindful of this prevalent view, we have been constantly evolving our Seahorse tagging tool to cut the conversion time.
From the beginning Seahorse included a unique autotagging facility, suggesting tags for each concept in the financial tables and letting you then review and confirm the appropriate tag. This process has always been quicker than traditional ‘drag and drop’ methods, but the new Bulk Review facility in the latest Seahorse release has made it even faster. No longer do you have to review suggestions line by line, you now have the option to confirm all ‘high confidence’ items – or even all items in the table. Three clicks are all you need. Seahorse also now interprets simple column headers containing only a year (e.g. ‘2011’) and expands these to the correct reporting period, saving you even more time.
To speed up the process still further, Seahorse now immediately alerts you if a tag you are about to create has already been used elsewhere to report a different number.
Are you prepared for iXBRL?
HMRC organised a highly successful iXBRL Solutions event at the Chelsea Football Stadium on June 30th. With a wide array of vendor exhibits, there was a solution for everyone. The interest in Seahorse was phenomenal. We appreciated the attendees’ obvious interest, as well as the air of conviviality and general willingness to squeeze in among the throngs who gathered all day long to look at our demo and talk about how Seahorse converts accounts from Word or Excel into iXBRL. Those who made themselves known to us ranged from sole practitioners to enormous accounting firms and FTSE companies. It was also great to see people who had introduced themselves at previous events returning to have another look and chat about the finer details. The demand for Seahorse is clear!
The CoreFiling Seahorse team is “Demystifying XBRL” all over the UK this week and next with the ICAEW and HMRC. Following the success of the London event on December 17th, which was packed to capacity, the ICAEW regional roadshows kicked off yesterday – aptly enough – in Manchester City Football Stadium. More than 80 people attended. Who would ever have predicted that XBRL would have such mass-appeal! Drama was heightened further by a brief emergency evacuation of the venue mid-morning; it seems that their smoke detectors are fully-functioning.
As the Manchester event wrapped up, one of the panellists drew the attention of the audience to the e-mail addresses of all the speakers listed on the Programme with the caveat that any hard questions should be sent to our very own John Turner! That’s fine by us, and if the questions are the kind of ones that might be of interest to lots of people, we may publish the answers, so please send them in or place them in the comments here.
Today’s venue is the Birmingham Botanical Gardens. On Monday, we have two sell-out events scheduled back-to-back in the splendid Chartered Accountants’ Hall in London’s Moorgate. On Tuesday, you can see us at The Bristol Golf Club. Then we travel to the north of England for a breakfast seminar on Thursday morning in the Ramside Hall Hotel, Durham.
The purpose of the Demystifying XBRL events is to help accountants understand what the iXBRL mandate means for them. We dispel fear and discuss solutions. The speakers cover everything from the high-level technical lingo to the finer details of the regulation itself. There’s also an opportunity to preview Seahorse, our iXBRL solution.
If you’re attending any of the events, please say hello to the Seahorse team!
Today we round out our review of some of the main answers to Why should you use Inline XBRL?.
Inline XBRL means a simplified review and improved control. It is probably obvious, but the review of an Inline XBRL document is considerably easier than that of a native XBRL document, simply because you can skip a step – you can be confident that the facts that have been marked up are the same as the “original” because of the single document aspects of the format. It is still necessary to determine whether the document has been prepared using the right taxonomy, whether the facts have been marked up (tagged) with the right concepts and using the correct dates and other context information such as dimensions, but users are very much more comfortable dealing with an Inline XBRL document that you can look at and “touch”, rather than the somewhat more abstract idea of an XBRL formatted rendering of a document. Naturally, Magnify (Touchstone) can deal with either format.
Let’s recap.
Securities regulators, company registrars and stock exchanges should all consider adopting Inline XBRL as part of their transparency initiatives.