Parcours personnel

Expert en Systèmes de Performance Management pour les grands groupes, j'ai, très tôt, été convaincu des apports certains du standard XBRL à ce domaine d'activité. Membre actif de XBRL France, XBRL Europe et XBRL International, j'exerce en tant qu'expert sous la raison sociale etXetera. J'ai représenté Cartesis en tant que membre fondateur de XBRL France.
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lundi 19 juillet 2021

ESEF 2021

 

  

ESEF 2021

 

 

Que faut-il pour préparer un rapport de la meilleure qualité ?

 

 

 

 

 


 

iXBRL est la norme de présentation des rapports annuels des sociétés cotées en Europe obligatoire pour les exercices commencés à partir du 1er janvier 2021

Toutes les données deviennent échangeables entre les systèmes, interrogeables d’un clic et comparables entre elles.

Tous les outils et applications qui traitent de l’information financière sont concernés.

·       XBRL est dans un premier temps la cible : le besoin est de produire des rapports XBRL.

·       XBRL va devenir rapidement la source : le besoin est de lire des rapports XBRL pour alimenter les systèmes.

·        L’objectif est que XBRL entre au cœur des systèmes d’information.

 

L’ESEF consiste à structurer le contenu des états financiers et rendre l’information plus accessible, compréhensible et utilisable pour les comparaisons et les analyses.

 

L’ESEF est aujourd’hui limité par l’ESMA au marquage des états financiers primaires, mais les avantages de combiner des informations lisibles par l’homme et lisibles par machine peuvent aider de nombreux domaines à passer des processus manuels inefficaces à l’utilisation de données structurées.

D’autres systèmes de création de rapports nécessitent des informations plus granulaires à baliser, ainsi que des informations textuelles. Cela ouvre le champ de la numérisation beaucoup plus large de l’information comme les informations environnementales et sociétales qui sont de plus en plus utilisées dans l’évaluation des opérations d’une entreprise.

L’avenir est donc à la production de plus en plus d’informations accessibles via le web, précises et structurées.


Il est temps de faire évoluer les systèmes pour préparer ces informations, plutôt que d’essayer de reproduire et de transformer les anciens processus qui utilisaient des technologies d’édition papier. 


 

 

dimanche 25 octobre 2020

Transform to ESEF ?

Browsing the web, one can find statements like this: “Because aesthetics and visual design aren’t part of the ESEF requirements, design details are often overlooked in the conversion process of PDF files and the transformation will eliminate all the benefits of a beautifully designed report.”

Is really ESEF a conversion of nice-looking PDF files?

PDF and HTML are two different technologies and experts could spend enormous amounts of time explaining the pros and cons based on their expertise and preferences.

In summary, it can be said that PDF is just a file format used primarily to be printed, archived, or integrated into a pre-press production line. The visualization of the document is frozen and non-adaptable while HTML is web format, which can be created with a simple text editor and adapts to all types of visualization.

In addition, ESEF is about iXBRL which takes the HTML standard that is used to power the world’s web pages and embeds extra “tags” into it. It gives meaning to the figures and statements in a format that can be understood by a computer.

Preparers and users

Should preparers focus on their financial statements design? Of course, and iXBRL allows preparers to retain full control over the presentation of their report.  This includes the use of graphics and photos.

Should they be concerned on how they will look like if printed: this is what PDF technology has developed for years now, involving the cost of highly paid design agencies?

Or should they be more concerned how they will be used with modern technology?

Users will never print the PDF files. The printing remains in the hands of the company that publishes the document.

The UK Government has recognized “that people read differently on the web than they do on paper. This means that the best approach when writing for the web is different from writing for print and concluded that it is really important to create content that is clear, concise, structured appropriately and focused on meeting the user need. A PDF document that was created for offline use will not suit the context of the web and is likely to result in a poor user experience.”

In addition, as XBRL International writes: “Working with iXBRL data is not just about exploring reports using a web browser.  Valid iXBRL reports can be loaded into any compliant processor, and the data within them can be consumed by analytics engines, loaded into databases for querying, or processed into new reports.  All this can be done whilst retaining links back to the information as it was originally reported and presented.

ESEF is not about conversion of PDF to html

Considering that ESEF is just a conversion of nice-looking PDF documents to nice looking html documents is reducing ESEF to a change in format. Also considering ESEF as another regulatory mandate is not taking ESEF for what it is.  ESEF is about structuring content: rendering the information more accessible, understandable, and usable for comparisons and analysis.

ESEF is all about the tags that are inside and are not viewed in a printed form. As an example, and barely scratching the surface of what is possible using iXBRL data, it is possible to automatically search company’s accounts to find disclosures relating to a particular accounting standard.

ESEF is limited today by ESMA to the tagging of primary financial statements but the benefits of combining human-readable and machine-readable information can assist many domains in making the transition away from inefficient manual processes and to the use of artificial intelligence. Other reporting systems require more granular information to be tagged, together with textual information. This opens the field of much wider digitalization of information as, already prepared and tested, all environmental and societal information which is more and more used in the assessment of an enterprise operations.

The future is therefore to produce more accessible, precise and structured web information and it is time to make systems evolve to prepare such information, rather than trying to reproduce and transform old processes that were made for paper based technologies.

jeudi 26 mars 2020

Best practice XBRL taxonomies


Best practice has been defined as being “a method or technique that has been generally accepted as superior to any other known alternatives because it produces results that are superior to those achieved by other means or because it has become a standard way of doing things” (Charles Hoffman).

With XBRL, financial information is represented in reports that are explicated with a taxonomy, therefore, the necessary quality of the data reported depends on the quality of the taxonomy.
When representing financial information in an XBRL report, if the concepts and relations between concepts in the underlying base taxonomy are well understood, information can be represented precisely and correctly.  However, if the concepts and their relations are not well understood, information quality will likely suffer because the basic understanding of the underlying XBRL taxonomy lacks clarity or is ambiguous.        Read all...

vendredi 28 juin 2019

ESEF – Une technologie perturbatrice


ESEF, le format unique européen (European Single Electronic Format) pour le dépôt et la publication des documents de référence digitalisés à partir de 2020 constitue réellement une nouvelle technologie perturbatrice (« disruptive technology »). 

Elle remet en cause les processus de préparation et affecte les métiers des différents acteurs : comptables, auditeurs, services de communication. Lire...