Speed up the tagging process in year two and the creation of filings for companies in the same corporate group.
Seahorse makes excellent use of existing tags. It can re-use existing tagged documents as the basis for this year’s filings, even if those documents contain only a couple of similar pages and on the surface look rather different. Seahorse is intelligent enough to recognise the matching pages and automatically re-uses the existing tags in the new document. Remember that the rest of the document will then be automatically tagged, leaving you just to confirm the confidence-rated suggestions. It will certainly save you time and give you much higher quality documents.
Seahorse, the automatic choice.
Seahorse’s learning engine has accumulated an abundance of iXBRL tagging knowledge distilled from the thousands of Word and Excel accounts uploaded to our cloud-based system since the start of the HMRC mandate.
Why is this important?
It means that Seahorse’s tagging suggestions are constantly refined in line with our clients’ professional accounting expertise. You benefit from more confident suggestions to help you review and confirm the appropriate tags. It’s quick, easy and accurate.
Get the Seahorse advantage for your business!
Many accountants have told us that the iXBRL tagging solutions they chose in the first year have proved unsatisfactory, making the conversion process very painful. There were lots of reasons behind this: some processes were too complicated, others overly time-consuming, many more not intuitive enough. Consequently, many businesses struggled to comply with the HMRC iXBRL mandate.
If this was your experience last year, it’s probably time for a change.
Switching to Seahorse doesn’t mean starting from scratch, as all tables in your document will be automatically tagged using Seahorse’s unique suggestion engine
Tagging accounts can seem an onerous task, but Seahorse makes it really easy to tag both tables and text in Word or Excel documents. Behind Seahorse lies a powerful ‘learning engine’ that automatically provides confidence-graded tagging suggestions. You’ll benefit from all the tagging that was put through the system last year, as Seahorse’s suggestions are based on its cumulative knowledge of all similar tagging decisions made by the Seahorse user community. As it’s a SaaS (Software as a Service) solution, it learns from thousands of accounts, not only the ones you have tagged, leading to constantly improving suggestions and exceptional help with your tagging process. This dramatically reduces the time taken to tag your Word or Excel documents.
Being an internet based solution there’s no IT overhead, no software to install, no software updates and no maintenance worries. Taxonomies will always be up to date.
And if you’re wondering what happens in subsequent years, rest assured that Seahorse retains all the tags you choose, so they can be easily reapplied to make the process even faster and simpler in the future.
Avoid the pain, harness Seahorse.
We again return to the subject of year two tagging. We’ve talked in the past about how Seahorse can re-apply the tagging decisions already selected and confirmed in previous years’ tables and text. The issue today is speed of tagging – making the process as fast and painless as possible.
Seahorse has extended the ‘roll-forward’ process still further to make tagging even faster.
Both comments and footnotes can now be carried forward and reapplied in a similar way, simplifying the task further. Comments are transferred without the need for any user input, and footnotes can be confirmed in the same way as other tags.
Accelerating the process still further, there’s now an automatic confirmation option. So, where there are exact matches between table rows and columns in both previous and current documents, Seahorse can reapply the tags automatically without the need for manual intervention.
Just in case you were wondering, discretionary use of this facility is available, so you still retain full control over whether or not to deploy automatic confirmation of identical data. However, we think that many users are likely to opt for this extra time saving measure.
How long will it take to tag your year two accounts?
Perhaps you successfully circumvented the original HMRC iXBRL filing mandate by submitting last year’s Corporation Tax returns early to avoid the April deadline. If so, converting your accounts documents to iXBRL must now be on the agenda. What are the options? Well, if you’ve a number of accounts that you are already producing in Word or Excel, why change your process? Take a look at the advantages of Seahorse.
First of all, there’s help in choosing the appropriate iXBRL tags. Seahorse automatically tags the tables in your Word or Excel document and proposes the most appropriate tag to use. Its intelligent tagging engine harnesses the accumulated learning from all the filings put through the Seahorse system, so its suggestions continue to become more and more refined over time. There’s no need to trawl through the underlying taxonomy to find the tag you need.
If you have a number of accounts to tag within the same group company you can re-use your initial tagging decisions to swiftly create iXBRL documents for additional sets of accounts.
And if you have a formal review and sign-off process for your accounts, Seahorse lets you easily create a spreadsheet that automatically captures all the tagging decisions made and allows comments to be inserted, for example to explain why particular concepts have not been tagged.
Finally, Seahorse is provided over the internet, so you can use it straight from your browser, avoiding the expense of new infrastructure or purchasing a full-blown accounts preparation package and, because the whole process remains under your control, you don’t have to risk sending your data to third parties.
Seahorse remains one of the very few solutions to have experienced no problems passing the HMRC gateway first time. Why? Because not only does it incorporate validation against the Joint Filing Common Validation Checks imposed by HMRC and Companies House, but the underlying XBRL and iXBRL is fully verified during the Seahorse conversion process.
Seahorse takes away the pain of iXBRL conversion of Word and Excel accounts.
What could be simpler?
The momentum around iXBRL continues to accelerate. Denmark is the latest country to mandate iXBRL as the platform for financial reporting. Adopting a phased approach starting in June 2012, the official register for Danish companies, the Danish Commerce and Companies Agency (DCCA), will require all companies to file in iXBRL format.
The good news for Danish companies is that Seahorse offers full support for the new Danish GAAP taxonomies and caters for a number of requirements specific to the Danish market, including full verification of both XBRL and iXBRL against DCCA validation rules.
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?