XBRL News

European Central Banks (Balance Sheet Data Offices) IFRS XBRL Showcase Phase II Project Release

06 December 2006

The European Committee of Central Balance Sheet Data Offices (ECCBSO) and the International Accounting Standards Committee (IASC) Foundation XBRL Team are pleased to announce the release of their second phase project showcasing their joint IFRS XBRL project.

The ECCBSO was set up in 1987 on the initiative of notable European central banks (including Austria, Germany, France, Portugal, Spain, Belgium and Centrale dei Bilanci of Italy) and the European Commission.

The IASC Foundation is the parent foundation, created as part of the reorganisation in 2000 to oversee the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB). 

The ECCBSO Third Working Group has developed a reduced standard format in MS Excel, based on IFRS XBRL taxonomy. This format was developed as a standard IFRS-based questionnaire representing the minimum set of items that can be collected as the common information available to Central Balance Sheet Data Offices. The format was developed with the ultimate aim of reducing the reporting burden on European Entities. 

To see a full description of the project which created a further 150 instances from the real company data of European corporations (using an extension to the IFRS-GP 2006 taxonomy), please see: http://www.iasb.org/xbrl/xbrl_lab/eccbso-pub/index.html

The Showcase website documents all the steps in the process of developing the standard format, extending the IFRS taxonomy, creating the instances and analysing the captured data. It provides a detailed explanation of the challenges faced and an objective assessment of whether XBRL is suitable for the ECCBSO purposes. It presents this in two phases: The 2005 prototype and the 2006 enhancements phases.

We recommend the site to anyone contemplating the task of instance creation using XBRL and MS Excel.

Many thanks to the Central Banks who make up the CBSO Working Group III, the IASC Foundation XBRL team and to the software vendors – DecisionSoft, Fujitsu, UBmatrix and Rivet Software for the use of their tools.

Note: the instance data has been made anonymous due to CBSO Regualtions in many EU countires not allowing us to publish the names of the companies.