Basic inner workings and definitions of ESEF in Tangelo

From fiscal year 2020 the European Securities and Markets Association (ESMA) is mandating the use of the European Single Electronic Format (ESEF) for filing annual reports with local regulators (AFM). This format is both human-readable (it is XHTML, i.e. “web page” that can be viewed in an internet browser) as well as machine-readable (the XHTML/web page source contains machine-readable tagged information).

Tangelo supports generating the ESEF version of the annual report from the same source as the online and PDF versions. Directly from Tangelo, no need to do double-check the numbers.

Tangelo uses an ‘auto-tagging’ approach and provides full control over the XHTML output. This means that the engine will learn more wording during its use. However not all wording will be auto-tagged.

For automatically tagging the numbers in the financial statements, the ‘custom labels’ and ‘preparer extensions’ (as agreed by Finance, the accountant/auditor, and the taxonomy consultant) are configured in the integrated XBRL engine. In Tangelo, the user only needs to identify and indicate things like current and previous reporting year columns, and currency and precision (at table or row level). Information that will be rolled forward to the next reporting period.