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?
One of the positive things[1] about spending a lot of time out of the office is the opportunity to hear what companies are really wondering about. So, we’ve tried to answer some of the most frequent questions we’ve heard from companies soon to be filing to HMRC, albeit with an acknowledgement that some of the nuances may be further refined by the relevant authorities in due course. We include pertinent links to regulatory websites too.
If you have comments on the content, or if you would like to suggest other questions for inclusion in our FAQ, please use the comment facility, or e-mail
us at info@corefiling.com.
If you’re not an HMRC Filer, you might be interested to explore other similar pages dedicated to Regulators, SEC Filers and SBR Projects, where we’ve described the issues currently facing these groups and offered some perspective on the solutions now available.
[1] The downside, of course, is that we don’t have a lot of time to blog 
Interesting take on XBRL for small caps and microcaps on the SEC’s Government-Business
Forum on Small Business Capital Formation being held today.
According to speakers including Malcolm C. Persen, CFO at Radyne Corporation, Chris
Whalen from Institutional Risk Analytics and Greg Adams from EDGAR Online, Interactive
Data will help new investment vehicles such as hedge funds, and the buy-side
generally, to access small and micro-cap companies as a hitherto-ignored asset
class. Fund managers are looking for a competitive edge, and the small-cap
world is believed to offer that. Investors like the Virginia Retirement System
would feel that they are better able to cover those types of stocks if a lot of
the labour-intensive work can be avoided. XBRL offers a way for them to gain a
better understanding of the business, without incurring a lot of the complexity
and expense that they encounter today.
In fact, all the points from Assoc. Prof. Deborah
Allen-Hewitt, who sits on the Investment Committee of the Virginia
Retirement System, were well made. From her perspective (backed up by Chris
Whalen) the problem is not too few analysts on the sell side. The sell side is
likely to continue to focus on the big end of town. The entire investment world
will become their own analysts, and Interactive Data will make the financials
more pervasive, facilitating that analysis and investment. This is a new
business model for financial analysis. According to Prof. Hewitt, XBRL could
mark a watershed in the speed, accuracy and availability of information. That
said, investors want something new. Broader, deeper data about companies is
what investors really want to see, and XBRL provides a great way to provide it.
There are 15,000 odd companies that are outside of the Russell 3000. According
to the panel, Interactive Data will help small companies make their story
because the information will be better, more believable and more transparent.
It will help investors sift this information, which is why there is a real
advantage in being an early adopter. The first group of small companies to get
involved will be the first to be identified.
Unsurprisingly, there was a uniform call for improvements to tools that the
user community can take advantage of. We’ll see if we can do our bit