Online database to ease access to financial reporting

The Corporate and Business Registration Department (CBRD), which operates under the aegis of the Ministry of Finance and Economic Development, will shortly implement the Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) project, a new technology, as the standard for online financial reporting to support and improve the accessibility of financial information. 

In this context, a workshop was held on 04 November 2016 at the Voilà Hotel, Bagatelle at the initiative of the CBRD to showcase the project and acquaint stakeholders with the new system. It also served as platform for the CBRD to demonstrate the various features of the online service.

The XBRL project which will be put in place by mid-November with the assistance of the IRIS Business Service Limited in collaboration with the State Informatics Limited, is in line with the modernisation programme of the CBRD in view of transforming the Department to an e-Service organisation and towards a paperless registry.

Some 80 participants, namely representatives from both the Private and Public sectors as well as Management Companies, Regulators, Audit companies, the Financial Services Commission, the Financial Intelligence Unit, and the Financial Reporting Council, among others, attended the workshop.

In her address, the Registrar of Companies, Mrs P. Chinien, stressed on the importance of the system to ease access to financial information. According to her, several benefits are to be derived with the application of the XBRL, such as the quick and easy retrieval of financial data and information. The application will also facilitate the submission and processing of financial information online.

The XBRL Project

The Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) which can be compared to a “barcode for reporting”, is an open, international standard for electronic communication of business and financial data. It provides an identifying tag for each individual item of data on the financial statements and enables automated processing of the information, cutting out manual re-entry and comparison.

The project will be supported by the IRIS Business Service Limited as the XBRL domain expert for its filing platform that will enable collection of company financial statements. XBRL technology has been adopted by 60 countries and 100 Regulators across the world.