What has already been a reality in the EU since 2020 with the introduction of mandatory disclosure according to Machine readable/XBRL will now also become a regulatory obligation in Switzerland on 1 January 2024 with the implementation of the counter-proposal of the so-called Responsible Business Initiative.
While the requirements from Brussels for the coming year focus not only on financial key figures but also on non-financial content in ESG reporting and prescribe machine-readability by means of coding/tagging, in Switzerland only climate-relevant, non-financial content and figures must be published in machine-readable form for the time being. The EU has announced that the precise taxonomy requirements for ESG reporting will be in place by June 2023 - we will stay tuned, exchange information with authorities and committees on an ongoing basis and pass on our findings and experience from the EU and Switzerland to you.
built-in vs. bolt-on
Two approaches are currently possible for coding: the bolt-on approach, in which the relevant financial and non-financial figures and content are tagged/labelled in the layout (usually created from the PDF) after the annual report has been completed, or the built-in approach, in which content and figures are labelled directly at the source as a parallel process before further processing. The reporting solutions ns.publish and ns.wow follow this approach, i.e. built-in.
Advantages of a built-in solution
- Coding directly at the source, making it easy to label text blocks and passages
- No detour via PDF and no loss of the logical sequence of the information (continuation chains).
- No additional interfaces to external solutions and service providers, thus no platform break and associated time savings
- Autonomous, editable and traceable without external service providers
- Repeatable as required, with roll-forward functionalities in subsequent years
- Significant time savings due to direct, parallel processing of content in the editor and thus no premature freeze and loss of important days at the end of the process for downstream tagging.
Learn more about the tagging plus module, the built-in solution for ns.publish and ns.wow.
Join one of our free Machine readable/XBRL.