Copenhagen Stock Exchange Focus: Digital Financial Statements

For a long time, companies, public authorities and auditors have wanted to beable to digitalise companies’ annual reports and other types of reporting tothe external environment. This may soon be possible because there is nowbroad support for a common market standard, says State Authorised PublicAccountant Lars J. Dyrner, KPMG, Chairman of XBRL Denmark, in Focusno. 88, which was published today.

The development of the XBRL standard and the rapidly increasing supportfor the standard will soon allow companies to improve the efficiency of thereporting process.

This improved efficiency will create a more transparent reporting, increasecompanies’ presence on the capital markets, cut costs and lighten thecompanies’ workload significantly.

However, not just companies but also public authorities, the capital marketand auditors can obtain a number of advantages from using the XBRLstandard. This is due to the fact that XBRL is based on digitalised legislationand accounting standards – the so-called taxonomies. The standard ensuresunambiguity and transparency, improved possibilities in relation to bothinternal and external controls, and, moreover, the XBRL standard maycontribute to reducing unintentional errors and omissions in the registrationprocesses.

Read the article ’Digital financial statements’ in Focus no. 88. Questionsto the author may be forwarded to the e-mail address info@cse.dk until 2 September 2004.