iXBRL - please don't try this at home...

Practice automation and Excel expert Simon Hurst is one of those who has been encouraging accountants to embrace the potential of electronic filing and XBRL. Not that everyone's talking about it, he takes an introductory stab at trying to add XBRL to a set of accounts in Excel...

Despite some valiant attempts to prevent the inevitable, we’re just a few months from XBRL becoming the mandatory format for filing corporation tax returns, computations and accounts online. Suddenly everyone’s panicking about how on earth we’re going to get it all sorted out in time.

If you use tax and accounts production software then it’s easy. You’re in the hands of your supplier. For a bit of reassurance, you can go to the HMRC site to see if your supplier is in the iXBRL approved list or just “working towards”. Several suppliers have issued white papers and progress reports for additional information.

But what happens if you produce some or all of your accounts using Word or Excel? You’re now the software developer – how are your development plans for incorporating iXBRL output into each of your Word documents or Excel spreadsheets progressing? Hopefully not at all, because I’d be surprised if any organisation that doesn’t have software development as its prime focus will find it worthwhile building its own iXBRL output.

If you are a business that just has to file a single return and documents then the answer may be to use the free HMRC PDF form. According to the HMRC site, their forms are designed only to cope with simpler sets of accounts. If you’re an agent needing to submit a large number of returns, computations and accounts then filling in dozens of PDF forms manually – and making sure you’ve done so correctly – could be prohibitively time-consuming.

The answer could be ‘post-production’ tagging – taking the final document and paying someone to convert it directly into the approved iXBRL format, or buying in the tools to do it. Unfortunately, there doesn’t appear to be much information around at the moment about how much that is likely to cost. Alternatively you could abandon your Excel/Word solution and adopt an accounts production package.

So why not try to do it yourself? After all, Office 2003 and Office 2007 include the capability to save documents and spreadsheets as XML files and iXBRL is just a particular type of XML. How close to the final result would you get with a quick File, Save As, XML file? Unfortunately the answer is almost certainly: "nowhere near".