How the Danish Commerce and Companies Agency Will Make Use of XBRL

By Michael Rugaard

Programme Manager

The Danish Commerce and Companies Agency

Is an agency under The Danish Ministry of Economic and Business Affairs

Administrates the law on companies accounts and certain parts of business law

Receives annual accounts and company information from 120.000 businesses

Keeps registers of this information available to the general public

Business reporting today

All annual filings are: received on paper scanned to a certain extent retyped into a structured form by

third party vendors of financial information The filings are frequently made by the

company’s accountant, using: Microsoft Office Caseware Local brand accountancy software (i.e.: “Focus IT”) “Homemade” software

The companies often use ERP systems emanating from MBS Navision (Axapta, Navision, Concorde, C5 etc)

DCCA and Digital Filing

DCCA has been working with digital filing since the 1990’s

Different Technologies applied since 1995 - without much success EDIFACT XML

Digital filing through XBRL starts – on a voluntary basis at the 3rd of January 2005 Focus must be on user friendliness

Objectives for digital reporting

Increase the level of service provided to businesses

Enable faster and more cost-efficient regulatory control

Enable reuse of data across organizational boundaries (one-stop-Government)

Reduce reporting burdens and costs for businesses

Reduce costs and burdens related to consuming financial data

Why XBRL

XBRL could be the missing link in the supply chain

XBRL gives advantages to end users of data and to filers as well as it becomes lingua

franca

DCCA and XBRL

The DCCA has developed an XBRL- taxonomy (working draft)

The taxonomy will be expanded to cover the needs of other government institutions

The taxonomy can be used free of charge by anyone interested

The Flow

Mail/Browser

ERP System

System for creating annual reports

General Meeting

Approving accounts

Audit

$

VISIOCORPORAT

ION

XBRL

YearlySettlement

- Generating af PDF- Storing XBRL file

Business Accountant DCCA

B) Email containing:1) Annual report 2) Digital Annual Report (XBRL)containing some of the facts and a PDF with all the factsDigital signature on report shown in browser

Testing digitalaccounts

Trial balance

A) Email containing:1) Annual report 2) Digital Annual Report (XBRL) containing some of the facts and a PDF with all the facts

Management Report

XBRL

Making Data Available

The DCCA will provide financial (XBRL) data Through our own user interface with

limited functionality

as well as

By selling data bulk to third party vendors By providing general system-to-system

user interfaces (web services)

The DCCA said all this a year and a half ago in Amsterdam – why has nothing happened…?

Well, it has, but: We have been too ambitious We have had to overcome too many technical

problems XBRL wasn’t as readily available in user

software as expected

Too Ambitious…

We wanted the entire annual filing in a structured digital form! But: Nobody is going to bother do all mapping that voluntarily Nobody really needs all that A taxonomy can’t really express all the quirks of Danish

lawmaking in this field It is neither technically nor practically feasible to ensure

that an all-encompassing taxonomy is used correctly We wanted to create correct presentations of data in

the XBRL-filings in their entirety …This was where we found out about what was

technically feasible and what was not

Too many technical obstacles

Problems we brought onto ourselves We did not work with Proof of Concepts for

The use of our taxonomy (its internal logic) Support for XBRL in user-software The possibility of making a style sheet that would work for

any (Danish annual) XBRL-filing It wasn’t until late in the process that we gained

knowledge about the real life use scenarios for our taxonomy

XBRL-problems (relating to spec. 2.0a) When we started out, our developers basically had to

invent every single tool for themselves Certain XBRL schemas didn’t parse correctly in major

XML parsers There seemed to be flaws in the spec’s

XBRL was (is?) not always so well implemented in user software

An important provider of accountancy-software had implemented one sub-set of XBRL

An important provider of ERP-software had implemented another sub-set of XBRL

We needed both subsets and then some Lesson: It is important to see, that XBRL-

enabled software supports at least the same core specifications of XBRL.

Our Approach

We encourage cross sectored support for XBRL

We do this on a number of levels and With a number of actors We share our experiences and results

---- XBRL should follow the same lines of

development as regular XML and be Backwards compatible

So, what does the DCCA do now?

We are getting more user focused by issuing a smaller taxonomy only containing data

elements that are in high demand and that emanate directly from ERP-systems for the

most part We do not upgrade to spec. 2.1 of XBRL

Until we have seen it work across software platforms We do not try and make presentations of instance

documents, but plan to live in a mixed environment (XBRL + PDF) for a while

We don’t do anything new in this field without POC We keep supporting and evangelizing XBRL

throughout the Administration We will do pilot scale tests with large providers of

annual filings …and we hope to receive filings during 2005!