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CEN Workshop Agreement

Status: Working Group Working Draft

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Foreword

This document is a working document.
This document has been prepared by CEN/WS XBRL, the secretariat of which is held by NEN.
This document is a working document.

Introduction

The set of recommendations included in this document aim to facilitate the implementation of European National Supervisors to adopt XBRL in any of the reporting frameworks. The following chapters will provide guidance on the use, understanding, preparation, and extension of their filings in eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL).

This guidance is in the form of notes in association with the pertaining requirements clause and uses the terms “should” (recommendation), “may” (allowance) and “can” (possibility). Organizations wishing to implement this CWA would be expected to consider all recommendations where the term “should”is used.

Scope

COREP, FINREP (and Solvency II or other future) XBRL taxonomies are offered to European regulators for national implementation. The first releases (2006) of the COREP and FINREP XBRL frameworks have proven that a standardized technical roll-out package is needed to increase the adoption rate and avoid implementation variances, which have a detrimental effect on the overall cross-border effectiveness of using one reporting standard. This roll-out guide tries as well to promote the economies of scale of a better adoption.

This CWA have divided the work/deliveries in two difference parts:

i) An XBRL supervisory roll-out guide: this is oriented towards national regulators on how to implement, extend and manage XBRL taxonomies

ii) An XBRL handbook for declarers: this is a roll-out guide or reference handbook would give a general introduction to XBRL and serve as a help to preparers of XBRL (reporting entities)

The scope of the current document is on the second part of the CWA; the XBRL handbook for declarers.
[DRAFT]

Normative references

The following referenced documents are indispensable for the application of this document. For dated references, only the edition cited applies. For undated references, the latest edition of the referenced document (including any amendments) applies.
EN xyz:199x, Title of the european standard.
EN ab c:199x, General title of series of parts — Part c: Title of part.

Terms and definitions

For the purposes of this document, the following terms and definitions apply / the terms and definitions given in … and the following apply.

Term1 

description on text for term1

Term2 

description on text for term2

How to start with XBRL from the declarer's perspective

XBRL stands for eXtensible Business Reporting Language. It is a language for the electronic communication of business information, providing major benefits in the preparation, analysis and communication of business information. It offers cost savings, greater efficiency and improved accuracy and reliability to all those involved in supplying or using business information.

XBRL is increasingly adopted as communication standard by more and more regulators around the world. The entities which are providing this information to the regulators might initially see XBRL as just another way or format of the required information. However, XBRL provides many benefits for the declarer as well. All types of organisations can use XBRL to save costs and improve efficiency in handling business and financial information. Because XBRL is extensible and flexible, it can be adapted to a wide variety of different requirements. All participants in the financial information supply chain can benefit, whether they are preparers, transmitters or users of business data.

XBRL can be used with the help of various software tools, in a way that the user doesn't need to understand or even see the XBRL itself. However, a basic understanding of the basic components of XBRL allows the user to better grasp the potential benefits of XBRL.

The ambition of this document is to explain the basic underpinnings of the XBRL standard. Although these aspects might seem technical at first, all topics will be addressed in a general, comprehensible way.

This section is further being elaborated during the Workshop with the input from the other project teams.

XML and XBRL: Introduction to its technological building blocks

This chapter aims to give an overview of the basic technologies that underpin XBRL. Our aim is to give a general introduction of each component in order to obtain a better understanding of this reporting language. Since XBRL is built upon the XML language, the this chapter will focus on the basics of the XML standard, in particular the XML components which are also used by XBRL.

XML

XML, or eXtensible Markup Language, is a W3C standard which enables the representation of structured data in the form of flat text. This simple and flexible text format is both machine readable and human readable. The XML specification, which is a derivative of SGML¹ , uses elements and attributes in order to structure content. Although originally designed for the publication of information, XML is increasingly important in facilitating electronic communications.

In the chapters further below, we'll elaborate on the following topics:

• How XML is a markup language
• How XML enables the structuring of information
• What are the main components of an XML document
• Namespaces and prefixes
• Unicode
• XML benefits

¹ SGML (or Standard Generalized Markup Language) is an ISO-standard technology for defining generalized markup languages for documents. SGML itself descends from GML (Generalized Markup Language), which is developed by IBM in the 1960s.

XML as a markup language

Simply put, one can say that XML is a language for the codification of structured information. This coding, which is done via the use of "tags", is the main reason why XML is commonly referred as a markup language. As a basic example, the list below represents a list of books:

   <book>On the Road</book>
   <book>The Catcher in the Rye</book>
   <book>The Hobbit</book>
   <book>The Name of the Rose</book>

The name of each book is delimited by two marks. The first mark contains an identifier enclosed in angle-brackets (<book>), indicating the beginning of a field. The second mark is equal to the first, but also contains a closing bracket (</book>), which indicates the end of a field. As a result, the content of each element of <book> is delimited by the opening and closing tags. With this method, a system that processes this information can easily identify the subject and aim of the provided information.

XML structures information

In the previous example, only the element <book> was provided. The XML information model is however hierarchical: an element can contain other elements, which in turn can also contain other elements. This is made clear with the following example:

<library>  
  <book>
    <title>On the Road</title>
    <author>Jack Kerouac</author>
  </book>
  <book>
  <book>
    <title>The Catcher in the Rye</title>
    <author>J. D. Salinger</author>
  </book>
  <book>
  <book>
    <title>The Name of the Rose</title>
    <author>Umberto Eco</author>
  </book>
  <book>
</library>

In the example above, the "library" element contains a set of "book" elements. Each of these "book" elements contains a "title" and an "author" element.

Components of an XML document

The most important components of an XML documents are the elements. Elements are defined by their name, their content (the value which is between the angled brackets, which can be null) and an indefinite number attributes. The example below shows an element with two attributes:

 <element attribute1="attr-value1" attribute2="attr-value2">content</element>

An XML document may start with an XML declaration, where the used XML version is identified (typically 1.0) as well as the character encoding. This is followed by the first element. This element is called root element. This will have a number of undetermined "children" elements.

 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"> 
 <library>  
    <!-- other items --> 
 </library> 

The example above shows an XML document which uses version 1.0, has UTF-8 encoding and has "library" as root element.

The XML specification defines an XML document as a text that is well-formed, i.e., it satisfies a list of syntax rules provided in the specification. This list is fairly lengthy, but some key points are:

• Only properly encoded legal Unicode characters are allowed.
• None of the special syntax characters such as "<" and "&" appear except when performing their markup-delineation roles.
• The begin, end, and empty-element tags that delimit the elements are correctly nested, with none missing and none overlapping.
• The element tags are case-sensitive; the beginning and end tags must match exactly.
• There is a single "root" element that contains all the other elements.

It is also possible to include comments in XML documents. These comments are not processed by applications and allow the inclusion of clarifications in the text document when deemed appropriate. Comments begin with the characters "<!-" and end with the characters "->".

Namespaces

Explain the use of namespaces: reason, URI, …

Namespaces and prefixes

Explain the use of prefixes (by further elaborating existing example)

UNICODE

Explain unicode

XML Benefits

Sum up and explain basic benefits of xml like; human-readable, self-containing, hierarchical structure, platform independent, …

XML Schemas

Introduce XML schema: definition of XML schema, why it is useful

XML Schema Components

Explain: types, attributes, groups of attributes and elements, importing and including schemas, substitution groups, …

Benefits of using XML Schema

Sum up benefits of XML Schema

XLink

Explain xlink

Technological components used by XML and by XBRL

XPath

Explain xpath

XSLT

Explain xslt

XQuery

Explain xquery

XBRL: Extensible Business Reporting Language

High level description

How to structure reporting data?

Before starting to explain XBRL, we would like to show via an example why the structuring of reported data can be useful. Reported financial data tend to be represented a table format. For example, the COREP Capital Adequacy table looks this:

Such a representation of information is very human-readable. However, it is not ideal for machine interpretation, as it is not very structured. As a result, the following question comes to mind: How can we structure this information, so that it can be transmitted and interpreted in a consistent way? For the purpose of this example, we’ll focus on the “Eligible Capital” line, which is highlighted in yellow in the above example.

A first step would be to tag the amount of Eligible Capital in a way that it is directly linked to the concept of Eligible Capital:

<p-ca:EligibleCapital>215</p-ca:EligibleCapital>

Although this information is already quite structured, some contextual information is missing. Information like the currency of the amount:

<p-ca:EligibleCapital unitRef=”EUR”>215</p-ca:EligibleCapital>

And finally, the reporting period:

<p-ca:EligibleCapital unitRef=”EUR” contextRef=”2012-12-31”>215</p-ca:EligibleCapital>

The above example shows, in a nutshell, how XBRL allows to structure reporting data.

XBRL Introduction

XBRL, or eXtensible Business Reporting Language, is a communication standard developed in order to simplify the exchange of business and financial data.
XBRL normalises the format of data (via the use of XML techniques) en the validation of data (via XBRL taxonomies).

ADD Explanation of the link between taxonomies and instance documents (as pictured above)

XBRL also provides among others:

• Standard validation rules (mathematical and logical rules)
• The use of label linkbases (which allows multi-lingual taxonomies)
• The possibility to provide rendering
• Standard toolset which allow to work with XBRL

During the following chapters we explain XBRL more elaborately. We try to give an insight in the following points: …

XBRL Taxonomies

XBRL taxonomy = "metadata" of reporting data. Taxonomies consist of schema's and relationships or linkbases

Schemas

The schema defines business conept (element of the schema) and basic attributes like: data type, period type, balance attribute, …

Linkbases

Explain linkbases like, label linkbase, presentation linkbase, definition linkbase, calculation linkbase

Extensibility

Taxonomy Extensions

Creating new relationships

Dimensions

The multidimensional model

XBRL dimensions

Formulas

XBRL Reporting: Instance documents

Explain with a practical example how an instance document is constructed…

Validation of XBRL reports

Describe the process of the validation of an instance document: xml validation, xml schema validation, xbrl validations, ….

Bibliography

[1] :xxx

[2] :xxx