Reporting with XBRL

Purpose

In SAP Consolidation, you can create and publish your individual financial statements and/or consolidated financial statements in XBRLformat for various taxonomies.

XBRL is a standard based on XMLfor the creation, publication, analysis, and comparison of information about business enterprises, with special emphasis on financial statements. The comparability of XBRL data results from the structure of the transmitted data, which is uniform across multiple enterprises.

The advantage of XBRL is that after you have prepared your data for this format once only, you can use your data for different purposes. Some examples you can use XBRL for:

  • Presentation of your financial statements in accordance with different accounting principles

  • Selection of subsets of the financial statement data

  • Preparation of financial statement data for various publishing media

The user of the information only needs to be concerned with a single format when dealing with data from many sources. The logical structure of the data always remains the same, enabling the user to further process the data more efficiently – the user no longer needs to manually prepare and adjust the data in order to analyze it.

Integration

You download the current taxonomies from the Internet.

The system reads the totals data from BI when creating an instance document – that is, the actual individual or consolidated financial statements.

Features

The following functionality is available:

  • Various taxonomies can be:

    • Downloaded from the Internet and imported into the Consolidation System (for example, taxonomies for US GAAP or German HGB); and...

    • Displayed in the consolidation workbench

  • You can assign items from any consolidation chart of accounts to the elements of a taxonomy.

  • You can create instance documents in XBRL format. These are the readable financial statements.

    When doing this, the system reads the totals data from the BI system.

  • You can publish instance documents (for example, via e-mail, over the Internet, or with a portal)

See also

More information about XBRL at www.xbrl.org