10 Expert tips for confident and efficient tagging

Effortless ESEF Tagging – XBRL Reporting Specialist Rahime Celepli’s top 10 tips

From understanding tagging to managing deadlines, here are my top 10 tips to help you navigate the process with confidence and efficiency:

1. Understand the taxonomy. What are the different data types, balance types and period types? Once you understand these attributes, the tagging of your report will become much easier. You can find both text and video material on our Learning Hub, where you can narrow down the material to what you need to know. Once you have absorbed this material, you will feel confident and ready to start your tagging project.

2. Ensure you have a well-defined process in place, including setting clear deadlines with your auditors (if applicable) and your design agency, to allow yourself the time necessary to complete your report.

3. As a first step, before you begin tagging, make sure you have selected the correct ESEF settings in the platform, for example the taxonomy you want to use and your reporting period. You can read more about this here where we recommend specific settings to make your tagging journey smooth.

4. Engage in a dialogue with your design agency to ensure your report layout and fonts are compatible with the xHTML output based on your ESEF settings. You can generate an xHTML-only output as a test to confirm that your report appears as expected when converted from InDesign/PDF to xHTML. You can read more about this here.

5. Avoid starting your tagging too early in the process; wait until your primary financial statements and notes section are populated and as close to being finalised as possible. This will save you time in the long run.

6. Apply hierarchical abstract tags to your primary financial statements and review the results in the XBRL Preview tab. This will give you a clear visual representation of the structure.

7. Auditors are increasingly requesting tables to be semantically parsed in the Notes section. This ensures the table structure is retained when converted to xHTML. Read more about how to achieve this here.

8. When applying textblock tags, use the Direct Selection Method. This will ensure your tags remain in place when you roll forward the tags to the next version of your report.

9. Go through the in-tool tagging validations as well as the overall validation report to ensure you have cleared any errors and warnings that may be present in your report before you submit to your auditors for a review.

10. Take advantage of the in-tool excel reports and the XBRL Preview.

• Calculation Report (Excel file) – this report will give you an overview of all the calculations you have applied in your primary financial statements to ensure accuracy.
• Mapping Report (Excel file), this report will give you an overview of the tags you have applied and all the details for each tag. This can be particularly useful for troubleshooting. For example, if you want to check the number format for each tag, you can easily find this information in the Mapping Report by applying a filter to the relevant column.
• XBRL Preview – this feature will give you a comprehensive view of your report. For example, the presentation tab within the XBRL Preview will allow you to visualise the hierarchical structure applied to your table.

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About Rahime

With over a decade of dedicated reporting experience, Rahime began her journey in 2008 within the realm of investment reporting, transitioning seamlessly into financial reporting as of January 2022. As a XBRL reporting specialist, Rahime is a part of our ESEF expert team.