ESEF Tools Widely Available

Posted on June 17, 2020 by John Turner

XBRL International has conducted a survey of XBRL Certified Software™ vendors that offer report creation solutions for ESEF. ESEF is the European Single Electronic Format, a new requirement for public companies in the EEA and UK. In the UK ESEF is part of the Disclosure Guidance and Transparency Rules sourcebook. All public issuers that report in accordance with IFRS in their consolidated annual accounts must report in Inline XBRL for reporting periods commencing on or after 1 January 2020. In practical terms this means that some 5500 companies will need to produce Inline XBRL formatted reports no later than April 2021.

We’ve now completed the production of reports on a country-by-country basis across the EEA and UK.

It is clear that:

• there is an active and highly competitive market for ESEF related software and services,
• there is very wide support for markup in local language, using the ESEF taxonomies and company-specific extensions,
• for the majority of countries there are a significant number of vendors that offer local language help desk services; and
• that the price of ESEF compliance is extremely affordable.

Copies of country-specific reports have been sent to each of the National Competent Authorities across the EEA and the UK and we expect that many of them will publish those reports on their websites, or make them available to companies in their countries.

The survey shows that wide choice is available. Some tools simply help a company convert their corporate reports into high definition Inline XBRL format without changing any other aspect of their reporting arrangements or workflow (“Bolt On”). Some offer an outsourced service to do the work for reporting teams (“Outsourced”). Others completely redefine and modernise the way that corporate reports are created, bringing collaboration, automation and control into a process that can often be manual, stressful and complex (“Disclosure Management”). The price points reflect those differences.

The bottom line is pretty simple: producing Inline XBRL reports for corporates that must comply with ESEF can be achieved with a wide array of tools that are now available on the market.

We plan to update the reports as additional vendors achieve XBRL Certified Software status and as vendors that are listed in the report expand their offerings with additional partners and additional offerings.

Please note that XBRL International doesn’t recommend specific pieces of software and it is most important that issuers go through their own normal procurement processes to ensure that they are buying software or services that suits their needs.

We set out below a summary report that provides details for the EEA and UK as a whole.

ESEF Offerings Overview

Number of Respondents: 16

ESEF Offerings Overview
Indicates the number of offerings in each category.