iXBRL Tagging Tool: Ensuring Compliance and Precision in Reporting

Written by: Vicky Nicholls

06/02/2024 - 04:04

TOPICS:

UK, Blog

iXBRL Tagging Tool: Ensuring Compliance and Precision in Reporting

4min Read

iXBRL, or Interactive eXtensible Business Reporting Language, ensures that financial reports are precise and compliant.

However, the process can be intricate and time-consuming.

Unless you automate the process.

By leveraging technology, you can simplify your reporting process, making it more accurate and freeing up your accountant’s time to focus on developing additional income streams.

What is iXBRL Accounts Tagging?

Interactive eXtensible Business Reporting Language (iXBRL) is the global standard for digital financial reporting. The iXBRL Tagging tool embeds your financial data with iXBRL tags, making the information machine-readable and accessible to regulatory bodies.

It ensures your financial statements are compliant with regulatory standards, as well as accurate and consistent.

In regions like Ireland and the UK, iXBRL filing is mandatory, with agencies like the Irish Revenue and UK HMRC requiring financial statements in iXBRL format for Corporation Tax returns.

Beyond its mandatory status in the UK, iXBRL’s relevance extends globally, aligning businesses with international financial reporting standards. This standardisation is crucial in an increasingly interconnected world, where companies often operate across borders.

By adhering to iXBRL, companies ensure that their financial reports are compliant, universally understandable, and comparable. Such alignment with international standards also positions businesses favourably in the global market, enhancing their credibility and reliability in the eyes of international investors and partners.

The Benefits of Automatic iXBRL Tagging Tools

An automatic iXBRL tagging tool offers a range of benefits that extend well beyond compliance.

It dramatically increases the accuracy of your financial statements. Automating the iXBRL tagging process reduces the likelihood of human error, leading to more reliable data.

It streamlines the reporting process. What once was a time-consuming task, prone to delays and inaccuracies, is now a swift, efficient process. It saves your accounting firm valuable time and allows you to focus on more strategic aspects of your work rather than getting bogged down in the minutiae of manual tagging.

It brings consistency to financial reporting. With automatic iXBRL tagging, each piece of financial information is categorised uniformly, making it easier for stakeholders to analyse and compare data across different periods and entities. This uniformity is crucial for investors, regulators, and other users of financial statements who rely on consistent data for decision-making.

It facilitates better transparency and accessibility of financial data. Machine-readable formats allow for easy data extraction, analysis, and comparison, making financial statements more user-friendly and transparent.

It improves business decision-making. With accurate and uniformly structured data, businesses gain a clear, unambiguous picture of their financial health. It’s invaluable for executives and decision-makers who rely on financial reports to identify trends, forecast future performance, and make strategic business decisions.

Introducing Silverfin’s Automatic iXBRL Tagging Tool

Silverfin’s Accounts Production and Corporation Tax modules produce iXBRL-tagged submissions automatically. The tool is designed to streamline the end-of-year and corporate tax computation and filing process.

“Silverfin is an end-to-end solution, taking the data from the client’s cloud-connected system, to doing their compliance and corporation tax and giving insights into that current live data.”
Martin Bugg, Digital Partner at Larking Gowen

At its core, it features built-in tax logic and computation throughout its workflow. It automatically suggests tax treatments based on Silverfin’s standardised data, ensuring that the most current tax rules and regulations are applied accurately and consistently.

With Silverfin’s Accounts Production module, you can create financial statements for a wide range of clients and save hours with automatic iXBRL tagging.

Once your accountant reviews and approves the tax computations, the tool automatically tags the CT600 and tax computations with iXBRL and can be submitted online to HMRC.

Silverfin helps you mitigate the risk of human error, guarantees consistency in data presentation, and saves you from re-keying or manually moving data.