Demonstration of iXBRL statutory accounts software solution
22 May 2010
One of the highlights of the Alphatax UK London User Conference 2010 was the first public demonstration of the TCSL Statutory accounts iXBRL tagging package. The session was led by Jim Khan, TCSL’s Head of Sales who explained the approach that the new software used to automatically identify and tag relevant items in statutory accounts documents and provided a demonstration of the technology.
Jim explained that the approach taken by TCSL was designed to provide the optimum solution to the problem of tagging a document for iXBRL purposes. Firstly the tagging package is designed to accept source documents from a wide range of programs including (but not limited to) Word, InDesign and Excel files. Jim explained that this approach allowed TCSL to offer the maximum flexibility to its users and prevent users being tied into using inappropriate and inflexible templates to tag their accounts.
Secondly Jim explained that the program is pre-configured with an extensive dictionary detailing the relevant sections of UK GAAP and IFRS taxonomies. When a source accounts document is imported the program reads the document and applies a range of contextual search routines to determine the closest match to each item in the accounts based on its knowledge of these taxonomies. Any assigned tags can be reviewed, amended or deleted during the review process. Importantly Jim explained that the pre-configured dictionary is supported by a user defined dictionary. Whenever users make amendments to assigned tags, or add tags of their own the user defined dictionary stores these decisions and include these choices in the tagging routines used in subsequent documents. Over time the program learns about the choices made across your organization and repeats these in order to ensure consistent and repeatable tagging across an organization.
Jim explained that the product was currently in the final stages of development and was expected to be released Summer 2010 at which time additional information would be available from the TCSL website.
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iXBRL statutory accounts software solution
6 November 2009
Tax Computer Systems is happy to announce the development of an iXBRL convertor for statutory accounts prepared by companies into the iXBRL prescribed format. The submission of iXBRL statutory accounts to HMRC will be mandatory from 1 April 2011. We have consulted with many of our customers, and they have informed us that in the main they wish to continue using their existing desktop publishing tools for creating the statutory accounts.
TCSL’s application converts documents created with these DTP tools to iXBRL. The system tags the statutory accounts prepared to either the UK GAAP or the UK IFRS accounting standards using the appropriate XBRL taxonomies. The user may also add additional XBRL tag names, or amend assigned tags. The software learns from previous choices and applies this knowledge when tagging other companies in the group and later periods. The automation in the conversion will offer significant gains to users compared with manual only mark-up software applications.
The application is due for completion in early 2010, with a comprehensive dictionary for the intelligent automation of the iXBRL tagging a few months later.
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What is XBRL?
24 September 2009
Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) is a data standard designed to ensure that electronic documents can be read by computers and enables numbers contained in those documents to be automatically extracted and reported upon. XBRL uses the Extensible Markup Language (XML) syntax. HMRC have supported e-filing using the XML standard since 2002. Alphatax was the first commercial package to support this e-filing convention and has since been used to file many thousands of tax returns electronically.
The advantage of XBRL over XML is that the names of individual reporting items (‘Tags’) are defined in a taxonomy which defines the business relationship of the tags. The XBRL standard also defines the format for values with different currencies, periods and decimalisation. In March 2006, HMRC published the first corporation tax taxonomy which included around 4,500 tags. Following discussions with our development team HMRC defined 1,200 of these tags as mandatory. If a mandatory item appears in the computation then HMRC expect this to be tagged with an appropriate XBRL identity. Non mandatory items do not need to be tagged for XBRL purposes even if they appear in the computation.
The disadvantage of XBRL (and XML) is the difficulty viewing the submitted data in a human understandable form. With the original 2006 taxonomy, HMRC provided a viewer (‘Style Sheet’) of the XBRL tax computation. As everyone who has used Alphatax knows we spend considerable effort to ensure that the tax computation is highly presentable. Our current presentational format is a result of nearly twenty years of improvements and refinements requested by our users. HMRC’s style sheet was unacceptably slow and displayed the computation poorly. In addition the stylesheet computation omitted many data items presented by an Alphatax tax computation.
Accordingly, HMRC chose last year to utilise a rendering offering called inline XBRL (‘iXBRL’). iXBRL is based around the Extensible Hypertext Markup Language (‘XHTML’) format. XHTML is also part of the family of XML markup languages. Alphatax will produce XHTML output based on its existing report presentation. XHTML can be easily displayed in a web browser, such as Microsoft Internet Explorer, although the display is not as good as that provided by Alphatax reports. The XBRL tags are embedded in the XHTML version of your computation in such a manner that the browser displays the tax computation only, and ignores the XBRL tags. HMRC’s computer systems are able to extract the values denoted by the XBRL tags and analyse those values independently of the original document in order to highlight issues requiring further investigation.
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Mandatory online filing of company tax returns
13 March 2009
Important changes are being made to the filing process for Company Tax Returns. These changes are due to take effect for returns filed after 31 March 2011 and will affect all companies filing UK Company Tax Returns. It is essential that companies understand their new obligations and make appropriate plans to enable their systems for online filing.
Alphatax will be fully enabled for the new filing regime. In 2003, Tax Computer Systems was the first commercial software organisation accredited to electronically submit CT600s via the Government Gateway with the current scheme and the company intends to be the first to release software capable of submitting the full range of tax calculations using the new scheme. This is made possible by the company's excellent ongoing dialogue with HMRC and with its customer base.
Tax Computer Systems plans to release this capability later in 2009 so that users can become accustomed to the process and provide feedback prior to the mandatory deadline. Significant delays by HMRC to the completion of the new mechanism have prevented the company from making the required changes in time for the Alphatax UK Spring 2009 Edition.
Download a brief guide to the new online filing regime or click here to see the HMRC guidance.
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