Software panies are drawing battle lines against aountants over who should provide lucrative services to help firms deal with new filing regulations.

All financial statements and rporate tax filings through the taxman and panies House must be done in a new technology format from 1 April 2011.

With the deadline looming, aountancy firms and software houses are peting to help businesses prepare their aounting systems to meet the new requirements. panies’ financial data will need to be “tagged” using iXBRL technology under the new rules.

With each piece of data tagged, it is easier to pare financial information from different panies.

The data is then nverted to enable users to view the tags attached to the financial information.

Aountants uld be more expensive for clients to use to help nvert financial data into iXBRL, pared to buying software to automate the process, said Graham Tilbury, senior tax technology adviser at financial software pany Digita.

“For the larger nsulting practices this is their opportunity to get more nsulting revenue,” he said.

However, Jon Rowden, Pricewaterhouseopers XBRL assurance leader, said that providing iXBRL technology was a “particular challenge for the software provider”.

He added that a lot of work would need to go into preparing tax pliance software to be iXBRL ready.

Dennis Keeling, a business software analyst and BASDA founder, said: “They can pete but why would they want to?”

Keeling nceded that the biggest disappointment surrounding iXBRL was that software vendors had not provided “a single interface with Excel”.

Sage estimates that there are approximately 5,500 tags under UK GAAP, and 12,000 under IFRS.