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.

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?

Our Magnify XBRL review tool comes built in with a range of generally applicable XBRL quality checks, as well as some jurisdiction-specific filing rules, such as the Edgar Filer Manual and HMRC’s Joint Filing Common Validation Critieria rules, but as Charlie demonstrates, the real power of Magnify comes from the ability to drop in custom rules.

Magnify’s checklist view allows users to build a custom, structured review based on checks that can be implemented in a range of technologies. The fastest way to build rules that operate on the XBRL semantics of a report is Sphinx. We do also support the XBRL International Formula standard, but as Charlie notes, “creating Sphinx rules is much, much easier”.

Charlie’s published the source to the rules that he’s using. Although readable, they look a little bland in this plain text format. Sphinx rules are most easily developed using SpiderMonkey which provides a rules development environment with syntax highlighting, concept drag-and-drop, and on-the-fly syntax validation.

There are a few neat features to note in the rulebase. The first one is these few lines:

transform
namespace "http://xbrl.us/us-gaap/2009-01-31"
       to "http://fasb.org/us-gaap/2011-01-31"

transform
namespace "http://xbrl.us/dei/2009-01-31"
       to "http://xbrl.sec.gov/dei/2011-01-31"

These two “transform” statements make all of the rules in the rulebase, which are written against the 2011 US GAAP taxonomy, also work with the 2009 US GAAP taxonomy. Once it’s published, two more lines will extended them to work with the 2012 taxonomy. Obviously this depends on the relevant concepts existing in both versions of the taxonomy, but where they don’t you can add some additional, more granular, transform statements to provide the necessary mappings. What’s more, if you happen to have an XBRL Versioning Report, you can easily generate the necessary transform statements.

Another thing to note about the rules is that they contain everything needed to generate the checklist that Charlie includes in the screenshot. Our validation platform is about more than just defining and executing validation rules. It’s about building a powerful and intuitive review environment:

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 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.

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.

A similar issue existed for other UK taxonomies, such as UK-IFRS, and indeed, any of the many other taxonomies hosted on the xbrl.org website.

As noted in my earlier post, most XBRL software already has some mechanism for configuring local copies of taxonomies so that processing is not dependent on your internet connection or third party websites. Unfortunately, configuring such offline copies isn’t particularly easy. This is where taxonomy packages can help, as they contain all the information necessary to set up an offline copy of a particular taxonomy.

As XBRL becomes an important part of everyday business, ensuring that XBRL processes are implemented in a robust manner becomes essential. Taxonomy Packages can make doing that just a little bit easier.

You can download the sample here: XBRL-GL-PR-2010-04-12-package.zip

This is a sample for testing purposes only, based on the official XBRL Global Ledger Taxonomy. The taxonomy is subject to the standard XBRL International Copyright and Licence.

This post is about a proposed standard that is very simple, took only a few hours to develop and which is just intended to make working with XBRL that little bit easier.

Taxonomies are a key part of XBRL. They typically consist of many files, hosted on a website somewhere, which are then referenced by the instance documents or extension taxonomies that use them. This creates two practical problems for people working with taxonomies.

Problem 1: Finding the Entry Points

Over time taxonomies have become increasingly complicated, and modular taxonomies consisting of tens, if not hundreds of files have now become the norm. In such a modular taxonomy, only a handful of those files are typically considered to be “entry points”, that is, files from which you would start the DTS discovery process.

For example, the full 2009 UK GAAP, IFRS, Banking and Charities taxonomies ZIP file consists of 603 files, but contains just four primary entry points. These are described in Word documents included in the ZIP file, which means in order to start working with the taxonomy I need to:

• Unpack the ZIP file
• Open and read the Word documents to decide which file inside the ZIP I actually need
• Open my XBRL software, browse to where I unpacked the ZIP file, and then browse to the right file inside the ZIP.

Wouldn’t life be just that little bit easier if I could just point my XBRL software at the ZIP, be presented with a list of the four entry points (with sensible, human readable descriptions), and then just open what I wanted? Something more like this:

Problem 2: Offline working

XBRL taxonomies are typically published on publicly available web servers, and then referenced by instance documents using an absolute URL. An XBRL processor consuming such a document will then follow the URL and download the files that make up the taxonomy as required. This creates two potential issues. Firstly, it means that you need an internet connection in order to process the document. Secondly, taxonomies are big (the UK taxonomies are made up of over 50MB of XML files) so you need a fast internet connection.

In order to support offline work, and to improve performance, you really want to be working with offline copies of taxonomies, rather than constantly downloading them from the web. Most XBRL software already provides some mechanism for working with offline copies of taxonomies.

At its simplest, software can just cache copies of taxonomies as it uses them, although that means that you’ve got to use it once before it becomes available for offline use, and the cache may be subject to an expiry policy to limit its size. In many cases it’s desirable to control explicitly which taxonomies are going to be stored locally, but this is often cumbersome to configure as you need to provide not only a copy of the taxonomy but also a “remapping” or “redirection” that specifies what public locations should be remapped to your local copy.

Wouldn’t life be just that little bit easier if I could just give my XBRL software a ZIP of the taxonomy, and it would configure itself for offline use, so that instance documents referencing that taxonomy would then “just work”?

The solution: Taxonomy Packages

Taxonomy Packages are a simple solution to the above problems that require only a minimal change in the way that taxonomies are currently distributed. Most taxonomies are already made available as ZIP files, containing all the files that make up the taxonomy. A Taxonomy Package is simply a ZIP file with an extra XML file dropped into it.

The XML file, called .taxonomyPackage.xml, provides a list of the entry points within the taxonomy, along with names and descriptions. The .taxonomyPackage.xml file also contains generic name, description and version meta-data about the taxonomy as a whole, enabling taxonomy distributions to be self-documenting. All names and descriptions have support for multi-language alternatives.

The other component of the .taxonomyPackage.xml is a set of remappings, that allow the contents of the ZIP file to be treated as if they were hosted at an internet location. At its simplest, a remapping could take the form of remapping the prefix “http://www.xbrl.org/uk/” to a directory within the ZIP file. This tells a processor that every time it encounters a URL starting with “http://www.xbrl.org/uk/” it should try to resolve it to an equivalently named file within the taxonomy package ZIP.

The format of the .taxonomyPackage.xml file has been kept as simple as possible. We’ve published some samples, and of course, a schema for the file format:

• A sample .taxonomyPackage.xml for the UK Taxonomies.
• The taxonomypackage.xsd schema.
• A complete Taxonomy Package for the UK Taxonomies

We will be publishing a simple spec on the details of how these files are to be processed just as soon as we’ve had a chance to write them down.

Working with Taxonomy Packages

As you will see from the comment at the top of the schema, we’re making this available under a Creative Commons licence that allows free use of the format (including for commercial purposes). Our hope is that the XBRL community will agree that this is a simple solution to a simple problem, and if we adopt a common solution then XBRL will become that little bit easier to work with, and just a little bit less intimidating for end users.

We’re actively introducing support for taxonomy packages into our products. The recent Magnify and SpiderMonkey 1.27 releases have support for opening packages, and SpiderMonkey 1.27 also has support for creating them.

If you would like more information on taxonomy packages, or would like to see a taxonomy package sample for your taxonomy, please drop me an email.

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.