Sage has added an XBRL Tagging programme to its portfolio to help practitioners and businesses meet April’s deadline for submitting electronic Corporation Tax returns with computations and accounts in iXBRL format.
Sage XBRL Tagging (powered by ONESOURCE), as the module is known, comes from the same stable that develops Sage’s Corporation Tax software – the former Deloitte Abacus unit that is now owned by Digita’s parent, Thomson Reuters.
Sage XBRL Tagging also makes it possible for accountants to auto-tag final accounts using pre-approved ‘format templates’, significantly improving efficiency.
According to Tim Hervey, business taxation analyst for Sage’s Accountants’ Division, the need for the new module arose because so many of its customers received external accounts in Word and Excel format.
“Customers want both integrated iXBRL accounts and tagging. They’ve forced us to provide a tagging tool,” he said. For bigger firms, typically 25-30% of clients produce their own Word/Excel accounts. “For these customers, accountants don’t want to have to produce a whole new set of final accounts, so they want a tagging tool.”
“Generally though we’re helping and encouraging our customers and look at the their whole workflow process to see if it can be set up better to help them through the whole journey,” said Hervey.