Produce great HTML design and tag a report in XBRL
in a single environment.
I have been tracking the steady shift towards Digital Financial Reporting over many years, while also encouraging financial executives to get to know the benefits of inline XBRL (iXBRL), which sits at the intersection of well-formed HTML web pages and XBRL tags.
Recently, I was asked by two firms to recommend potential partners that can support a digital-first (HTML) approach. This prompted a survey of tools that can offer to design, tag and review annual reports against the ESEF framework or the CSRD European sustainability framework starting with an HTML layout, rather than converting from PDF.
The good news is, that having predicted the appearance of such tools in an earlier article on Digital Reporting, I found a respectable number of candidates with a range of design capabilities across Europe. These vendors may be at the start of their journeys but had already found customers, not just in ESEF and CSRD reporting, but also local reporting frameworks and were referencing great looking XBRL reports and micro company financial websites as proof points.
This article summarises the key findings, including the shared characteristics that define the current generation and discusses what future developments are needed to move from digital-first solutions and simple XBRL tagging, to truly integrated corporate reporting.
The rest of this article can be read on Medium for free – here