The new electronic report according to the ESEF regulations

Challenge

Qintesi supported an important customer in the Engineering & Construction sector to comply with the new European legislation (directive 2013/50 / EU) which requires all European listed companies to prepare, starting from financial years from January 1st 2020, Consolidated Financial Reports in a single electronic format.

This format was defined by ESMA (European Securities and Market Authority) and is called ESEF (European Single Electronic Format). Electronic financial statements are defined since this format is a combination of the xHTML language (which allows the presentation of the financial report as a normal web page that can be read by users) and the XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) tags which allow accessibility to IT tools, analysis and comparability of consolidated financial statements.

Solution

To meet this regulatory requirement, the SAP Disclosure Management tool was used, which allowed compliance with the new ESEF regulations and, at the same time, had a limited impact on users’ operations.

With this solution, users had the opportunity to work collaboratively, each giving their own contribution in the preparation of the financial report for the part of their competence. Furthermore, users continued to use Office tools (such as word and excel) with which they were already familiar. This allowed for easy adoption by all users.

Standard DM capabilities enabled a version system to meet audit requirements, make version comparisons, and roll back to the correct version in case of errors. The adoption of the ESEF regulation was made possible through the implementation of the basic taxonomy (already present in SAP DM) which was extended for all the specific needs of the customer.