The reason for having a Primary Financial Statements (PFS) in your report is to provide comparability with previous years and other companies.
If you want to provide detailed information from the notes, you are free to provide correct and detailed tagging for these, but you will be looking at some heavy work that very few technical readers (if any) will make use of. Elevating note information will diminish the year-over-year comparability of the financial statements in your report, while increasing your workload and costs.
Exemple
In case a company states “Revenue” in their income statement and additionally states in their notes that revenue (currently) only consists of revenue from the sale of goods, certain customers/auditors' demand that you tag the “Revenue” in the income statement as “RevenueFromSaleOfGoods” instead of the broader “Revenue” concept, with the justification that the RTS states “When marking up disclosures, issuers shall use the core taxonomy element with the closest accounting meaning to the disclosure being marked up”.
Some lean on the “...closest accounting meaning...” to be whatever is behind the “Revenue” line above and tend to disregard the “...to the disclosure being marked up” part.
Les problèmes :
- By doing the above, the company/auditor elevates note information to the PFS, after which the technical part of the iXBRL file no longer has a PFS/note structure (and thereby also contradicts ESMA guidance). It also opposes ESMA’s chosen compromise with detailed tagging of the PFS and block tagging of the notes, as detailed parts of the note information would already be provided as PFS information.
- The customer could very well also have revenue from services next year where the tagging will then have to change, affecting comparability year-over-year both between the company’s own reports and other issuers.
- In the example above, the customer’s meaning of “Revenue” might change year-over-year (and could –from a data perspective– potentially become unreliable). Cela créerait un besoin inutile de maintenance et de révision constantes, avec des coûts tout aussi inutiles.
L’objectif de XBRL est de donner à un lecteur technique la même expérience qu’à un humain, mais dans un format structuré où l’information peut être facilement localisée et comprise au niveau international. Vous devez fournir une reproduction technique et détaillée de vos états financiers primaires et fournir des informations supplémentaires en étiquetant les notes. Furthermore, you are required to stay true to the structure; to not to leave out vital and comparable PFS information, and to provide a limited amount of detailed note information.
The example above is similar to tagging “Right-of-use assets” as “RightOfUseAssetsThatDoNotMeetDefinitionOfInvestmentProperty”, “Other finance costs” as “InterestExpense”, “Other financial assets” as “FinancialAssetsAtFairValueThroughProfitOrLoss” and similar.
Related to the “Revenue” example above, ask: "would it be beneficial to change the text in the income statement to “Revenue from sale of goods” to give the technical and visual readers the same experience?" Chances are that you want to keep the text to:
- Leave room for adding different kinds of revenue
and/or - Keep comparability with other companies.
Either way, tagging it as anything other than “Revenue” would not be aligned with the general and overall intention of XBRL.