South Africa to Require iXBRL

The CIPC in South Africa has recently announced that all companies must file their annual financial statements using inline XBRL. iXBRL is a form of XBRL that combines traditional XBRL tags with human readable HTML It eliminates the need to file an instance document separately from a human readable document such as HTML or PDF.

The requirement will become effective on July 1, 2018 and filers will use a customized version of the IFRS Taxonomy. With this announcement, South Africa joins several other regulators in the world who have gone to iXBRL or who (like the SEC) plan to do so.

According to IRIS, Core benefits CIPC has seen in iXBRL are

•     Availability of smart data without the need of re-keying or re-formatting
•     Reduced costs
•     Ability to quickly and automatically identify problems with filings
•     Ability to monitor data, activities and arrive at conclusions with far greater speed and confidence

Some of these benefits are best realized by using an inline XBRL viewer, such as that available on the SEC site. Such a viewer enables instant checking of the XBRL tagging before it is actually filed.