GLEIF Annual Report Demonstrates ESEF Taxonomy, InDesign Conversion
Many Inline XBRL documents in use today (think UK HMRC, Danish Business Authority, or US SEC) are packed with useful information, but without much effort put into their look and feel. Design comes second to the more prosaic task of getting across a range of information.
Of course, Annual Reports and many other kinds of business reports are developed with branding and design first and foremost in mind. The process of constructing them involves a number of different groups with complementary skills. The accounting and reporting experts within an organisation, often working together with an investor relations team and senior management, work to prepare relevant disclosures and to provide a description of the organisation, its goals, aspirations and business model. A design team works to pull all of this together into a visually pleasing format (using tools like Adobe InDesign®). Auditors review financials and sign off the final result. And now, XBRL expertise is added to the mix. Exactly how all of these moving pieces work together is something that many people are working hard on at present, not least because of the upcoming ESEF mandate.
To develop its 2018 Annual Report, GLEIF worked in collaboration with XBRL International, as well as PortAlchemy, a specialist software firm that is developing software to convert InDesign documents into Inline XBRL format.
Being able to automatically construct these highly designed XHTML documents directly from the Adobe design package that many design agencies rely on is a significant step forward… and yes, there are other firms working on developing similar capabilities.
The end result of this process are available on the GLEIF website, presented using the open source Inline XBRL viewer that we announced last month. The report uses the ESEF taxonomy, which includes official translations of IFRS tags in European languages. Click on the “Display Options” to choose your language of preference, remembering that you can download Excel versions of tables in the document using those translations if you wish!
Everyone involved learnt a lot and we will do what we can to share many of those lessons over the next few weeks.
More information is available in the GLEIF blog, press release and the link to the annual report is here.
