Industry sectors may need to agree on extra terms to make financial data machine-readable before a ernment scheme aimed at automating financial reporting will be fully usable for big business,aording to a UK software firm.

As the federal Treasury nsiders submissions to its plan to force big mpanies to use Standard Business Reporting for financial reports to ernment agencies in the face of slow take-up,Arkk Solutions director Richard Metcalfe says one of the most important tasks that needs to be mpleted is a taxonomy of terms,or tags.

This allows the software language that SBR uses,XBRL,to rrectly identify and place data such as earnings before interest,tax,depreciation and amortisation or profit after tax.

This has been done at a national level,including in Australia.But Metcalfe says specific taxonomies also need to be drawn up at a sector level.

“If you are in insurance,for instance,you have a uple of hundred [unique]terms you use,”he says.“[panies]do not all do the same thing,so we are never going to have a one-size-fits-all.”

parability mpromised

A spokeswoman for the Australian Taxation Office –which now has responsibility for SBR –says the ATO is watching international developments in this area,but its “taxonomy”for the SBR regime does not allow for this and she questions whether it should be allowed as it would rce the mparability of financial reports.

“Jurisdictions such as the UK and the US have used this mechanism to allow mpanies to extend the national taxonomy to ver ncepts specific to their business or industry.While allowing the filer to increase the range of items tagged,extension taxonomies can rce the mparability of data,and can enurage users to invent their own tags rather than locating equivalents in the national taxonomy.”

It is mpulsory to use XBRL in numerous untries now,including for all large listed mpanies filing to the Securities Exchange mission in the US and for all mpanies reporting to the UK tax and customs department.Ireland’s tax office will make it mandatory this year.

The software language called XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language)is used to tag financial data so it can be transferred online to ernment agencies and automatically read by mputer software,removing the need for human intervention to re-key data.

In Australia the ATO,Australian Securities and Investments mission and Australian Prudential Regulation Authority,as well as state ernment departments have aepted XBRL-tagged reports since 2010,but its use is still voluntary.

Big business unnvinced of benefits

In the past 18months thousands of small businesses in Australia have begun using SBR to report to the tax office,but with some exceptions,virtually no big business has done so.Part of the problem is that few are nvinced the benefits outweigh the set-up st and they will only nsider it as part of a major software upgrade.

Another is that providers of aounting software for big business don’t have much incentive to inrporate XBRL.

As a result,Arkk Solutions has been one of the beneficiaries of mandating of XBRL around the world.It nverts standard financial reports from Excel formats into the latest version of XBRL called iXBRL,which is the standard used in the UK and which the Institute of Chartered Aountants says needs to be adopted here.

iXBRL also nverts raw data into human-readable formats,removing the additional burden of also producing a PDF and web page reports separately.

Moving to iXBRL is also being nsidered by SBR.

中文新闻：澳洲计划强制实施SBR 行业术语还有待开发