XBRL Reporting

The XBRL format (eXtended Business Reporting Language) is an XML-based language that represents an international standard for the representation and transmission of accounting and financial information.

An XBRL instance is a file in XBRL format. To create an XBRL file, each piece of business data must be linked with the 'XBRL concept' that describes that data. For this purpose, each type of XBRL reporting is accompanied by a taxonomy: the taxonomy is a sort of 'vocabulary' containing all metadata that can make up the economic-financial document.

An XBRL file consists mainly of facts and contexts.

Facts can be divided into two categories:

  • items: are facts containing a single value
  • tuples: are facts containing several values. In fact, a tuple consists of several nested items, each containing its own value.

In an XBRL file, each item must be assigned to a context.

The context defines the entity to which the fact applies (e.g. Entoty or group of Entities), the period for which the fact is relevant and an optional scenario. The scenario provides additional information about the event such as the geographical area to which it relates.

Hereafter, for the sake of simplicity, the facts may be referred to generically as Item.

In order to be able to generate an XBRL instance, Tagetik allows the basic information of the taxonomy to be entered into the system and business data to be associated with the XBRL concepts that represent them.

Tagetik allows you to manage the entire logical flow of data production and the final reclassification in XBRL format of the information.

In particular, we can divide the production of the XBRL file into three macro-activities:

  1. the parameterisation of the taxonomy (through the use of the import utility)
  2. the preparation of the data to be reported: for example, the balance sheet data in Tagetik can be reclassified in Item/Context pairs, aggregating them in an appropriate manner. There is no built-in process within Tagetik to do this: it depends on the complexity of the specific taxonomy to be reported and the organisation of dimensions within the Tagetik domain. Tagetik provides some pre-package solutions, e.g. for the EBA and EIOPA taxonomies: the former uses the Tagetik APM engine to prepare the data to be reported, while the latter makes use of a stored procedure and ETL.
  3. the generation of the XBRL file from the table (XBRL_DATA) containing the data from point 1.