The most common issues, challenges and solutions in ESEF reporting - "Tagging attributes and labels"

1. Select the right concept: refer to the documentation label

Do not use the concept: “Investments in subsidiaries, joint ventures and associates”. Selecting an element in the ESEF/IFRS taxonomy from the name or label list is not always the right way. The IFRS taxonomy is made for single and consolidated accounts.

Many entities use, in their ESEF reports, the concept “Investments in subsidiaries, joint ventures and associates » which documentation label is: “The amount of investments in subsidiaries, joint ventures and associates in an entity's separate financial statements.” If the investment is not accounted for using the equity method, it should be marked-up with the concept: “Non-current investments other than investments accounted for using equity method”

Our tip: To select a core taxonomy element, refer to the documentation label.

2. Tagging "dashes"

The XHTML document may show dashes or empty fields for some line items in the statements. Empty fields should not be tagged in iXBRL. A preparer may simply not tag the element for line items appearing as dashes. If the dashes represent zeros, the preparer can choose to tag one or more line items with a zero value.

Our tip: Use the entry “fixed-zero” of the XBRL Registry 4 to tag a cell with a “dash”. The value will appear as “0” in the xbrl report. Furthermore, if a line has no value and should still be tagged, then the cell in the source document should be populated with a “dash” value.

3. Naming and labelling entity specific disclosures

The element extensions must have a name and a standard label. The ESEF reporting manual recommends that extension taxonomy element names should represent the standard label of this element in the CamelCase Concatenation [LC3] convention. No further guidance is given.

For good practice and reusability of the extended taxonomy in time, elements that are monetary, shares, per share, string, or text block item types, should not include company- specific or period-specific information in the element name and/or standard label. Domain members may include company-specific or period-specific information in the element name.

Our tip: Follow the IFRS style of elements classified in the same presentation role for standard labels of extended taxonomy elements. For example, use “current” and “non-current” for elements in classified balance sheets, use positive (negative) for net element values in income or cash flow statements.

4. Tagging more than the primary financial statements

The Regulatory Technical Standards (RTS) delineate what is mandatory and what is prohibited when it comes to markup.

Issuers have the option to tag more elements than are required if they wish (all or certain notes marked up using block tags or detailed tags of certain elements). It is possible to markup items from the financial statements presented in other parts of the annual report. Issuers can tag other non-IFRS elements only if an official taxonomy exists in their country.

AMANA Tagger provides all functions to tag the notes, details and can use additional local taxonomies.

Our tip: Notes and accounting policies may be tagged as block tags to anticipate the requirement for financial years opened on or after 1 January 2022. Detailed tagging is not required but allowed. Note that companies publishing consolidated accounts in accordance with standards other than or equivalent to IFRS are not allowed to tag their financial statements.

5. Preferred labels

There is a common misconception that the Preferred Label Roles “PeriodStart” and “PeriodEnd” in XBRL are directly related to the displayed value from a fitting period. Especially with ESEF there has been a lot of confusion among auditors about this connection when using specific software. This is especially true when it comes to the usage of Preferred Labels.

Some concepts might appear multiple times in the presentation linkbase, for example Equity being shown for several product segments in addition to a Total Equity over all segments. To clarify these cases in the XBRL presentation of a report, Preferred Label Roles should be used. The Equity concept has several labels in different roles in the ESEF taxonomy. Even is the Presentation Linkbase of your Entity-Specific Disclosure is correctly enriched, it is still “context free”. Just adding values from all the periods to the traditional tree-view might create the impression that values have been reported multiple times. The presentation linkbase of the ESEF taxonomy also makes use of the preferred label role in the example below:

The first occurrence of the Equity concept uses the PeriodStart label, while the second occurrence of the same concept uses the PeriodEnd label. This clarifies that there is a change of that particular value during the reporting period. The Preferred Label Role for a concept can be set in the details of the mapping to achieve a similar outcome in the company specific taxonomy.

The Label Role has no influence on the specified number or period. It exists ONLY for the representation of the label from the Presentation Linkbase structure. Depending on how you try to make this representation different, it can of course look like there are duplicate entries. In XBRL, however, they are technically only present once.

Our tip: Make sure you understand how your software is building the representation, be it as a flat list, tree view or table, especially if you are an auditor! The assumptions that go into that representation may not be correct or fitting for your use case

6. Tagging footnotes

Keep the following in mind before you start tagging footnotes: XBRL footnotes are not a synonym of the term Notes, which are the notes to the Financial Statements (as used by the SEC in the USA).

Our tip: Facts that belong to a table but are physically not part of it can be easily tagged with AMANA XBRL Tagger, just by using drag & drop from the XBRL taxonomy to the PDF or Word file.