What is XBRL?
XBRL is a language for e-communication of financial and business data for business reporting. It is a standardized communication language in electronic form to express, report or file a financial statements by a Companies. However, XBRL is only a method of presentation or reporting. It does not attempt to make any changes in the content to be reported.
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What is full form of XBRL?
The full form of XBRL is “EXTENSIBLE BUSINESS REPORTING LANGUAGE”.
Applicability of XBRL filing
Below mentioned class of companies shall file their financial statements and other documents under section 137 of the Companies Act, 2013 with the Registrar in E FORM AOC-4 XBRL:-
- All public companies listed in the stock exchange in India and their Indian Subsidiaries
- All companies with a turnover of Rs 100 crores or more.
- All companies with a paid up capital of Rs 5 crores or more.
- All the companies which are required to prepare their financial statements in accordance with the Companies (Indian Accounting Standards) Rules, 2015.
However, Non-banking financial companies, Housing finance companies and Companies engaged in the business of Banking and Insurance sector are exempted from filing of financial statements under these rules.
Moreover the companies which have filed their financial statements in XBRL under section 137 shall continue to file their financial statements and other documents in XBRL only, though they may cease to fall under the class of companies specified above.
How does XBRL (EXTENSIBLE BUSINESS REPORTING LANGUAGE) work?
XBRL makes the data readable, with the help of two documents
1. Taxonomy and
2. Instance document
Taxonomy defines the elements and their relationships based on the regulatory requirements. Using the taxonomy prescribed by the regulators, companies need to map their reports, and generate a valid XBRL instance document.
The process of mapping means matching the concepts as reported by the company to the corresponding element in the taxonomy. In addition to assigning XBRL tag from taxonomy, information like unit of measurement, period of data, scale of reporting etc. needs to be included in the instance document.
1. XBRL Taxonomy:
In Simplest of words possible, taxonomy can be defined as dictionary of accounting elements. This taxonomy is an ideal set of elements available with the ministry against which the data of the filer has to be tagged. Revised Taxonomy as released by MCA contains precisely 3,174 elements.
Tagging mechanism will be a process in which the data on physical financial documents will be converted as per available taxonomy. For the purpose of this tagging, XBRL softwares are available in the market. Details can also be obtained from XBRL portal of MCA.
(Note: Taxonomy as released by MCA as of today is compliant with Indian Accounting Standards and Existing Schedule VI to Companies Act, 1956. As and when IND – AS and Revised Schedule VI comes applicable, the same will be revised and hosted on MCA Portal)
2. Instance Document:
Once the tagging process is complete, the document that will be generated will be a machine readable XBRL document; this document is called as Instance Document.
Documents required for XBRL for MCA?
The following Documents need to be filed in XBRL Format:
- Balance Sheet
- Profit and Loss Statement
- Cash Flow Statement
- Schedules related to Balance Sheet and Profit and Loss Statement
- Notes to Accounts
- Statement pursuant to Section 212 of the Companies Act, 1956 relating to subsidiaries
- Audit and Annual Report
Benefits of XBRL
XBRL offers many benefits in the field of business reporting and analysis:
- Improved way of reporting
- Automated data collection
- Reliable and accurate
- Cost effective
- Time saving process
- Analytical process
- Safe in data handling
- Helps in better decision making
The use of XBRL is quite varied and wide. XBRL enables producers and consumers of financial data to switch resources away from costly manual processes, typically involving time-consuming comparison, assembly and re-entry of data.
MCA Taxonomy contains majorly the following parts:-
Elements and their characteristics like the nature of field (text, numeric etc), the nature of their balances, period type etc. In totality there are 3,174 elements.
Extended Link Base – Extended link base are further groupings of elements and are in totality 57 in number.
Presentation Link Base – Detailing of Extended Link Base.
Calculations
Labels
Mapping Process for E-Filing of Balance Sheets in XBRL:-
Step 1: Map or tag the company’s financial statements to the published taxonomy.
This can be done by following methods.
Certain ERP systems may have inbuilt feature to tag the financials to the published taxonomy of MCA XBRL Softwares.
Detailed list of software vendors for XBRL E-Filing can be obtained from http://www.mca.gov.in/XBRL
It must be noted that MCA does not recommend/associate itself with these vendors. It has been hosted just for public Convenience.
This is by far the most important and technical step of the process and nearly constitutes 70–80% of the XBRL E-Filing process. The Correctness of this mapping must be reviewed. Errors that creep in must be removed by professional judgement.
Step 2: Create an Instance Document based on the Mapping done above
Separate Instance document must be created for:
Standalone Balance sheet
Standalone Profit and Loss Account
Consolidated Balance sheet
Consolidated Profit and Loss Account
Step 3: Validate the created instance document
The Validation tool of MCA will be shortly available on the MCA portal. This tool is to be downloaded.
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