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Your ESEF

Since January 1, 2021, all issuers of shares and bonds subject to the Transparency Directive 2004/109/EC, revised by Directive 2013/50/EU, have had to apply the European Single Electronic Format (ESEF).

ESEF sets clear objectives:

reflect the will of the European Parliament and the Council to set up a single structured electronic format for annual financial reports in the European Union;
improve the accessibility, ease of analysis and comparability of the consolidated financial statements which feature in annual financial reports;
ensure that analysts and investors can make better use of the information which companies provide;
strengthen transparency within the European Union's capital markets.

Which documents should I use the ESEF for?

The following documents are covered by the ESEF regulation:

all annual financial reports (AFRs) as defined by the Transparency Directive and Universal Registration Documents (URDs) that serve as annual financial reports must be in XHTML format;
IFRS consolidated financial statements in AFRs or URDs must be marked up with XBRL tags, which must be incorporated into the XHTML document using Inline XBRL technology;
links to other documents which are not part of the AFR or URD do not need to be in XHTML format;
half-yearly financial reports and initial public offering documents are not covered by this new requirement.

ESEF scope

The ESEF taxonomy is the accounting basis that the European companies in question must use to mark up their financial statements. It is based on the IFRS Taxonomy which the IFRS Foundation updates each year to reflect newly required standard information, information provided by application guides, examples and common practice.

Annual financial statements featuring in AFRs for fiscal years beginning on or after January 1, 2021 must be marked up. In 2021, this requirement to mark up only covered primary consolidated financial statements under IFRS (income statement, statement of financial position, statement of changes in equity and statement of cash flows), including all comparative information included in these primary financial statements for the 2020 fiscal year.

Macro-tagging involves tagging information which appears in the notes to the financial statements, if these notes refer to at least one element from the macro-tags list featured in the reference ESEF taxonomy (Annex II of the RTS). Macro-tags should be used if they refer to information which appears in the Annex. Conversely, there is no need to use macro-tags which do not refer to any meaningful information in the Annex.

Supporting you to produce your document under ESEF

Labrador's teams can help you to create an ESEF project which produces and presents information that your stakeholders can trust, whatever your production method (PDF, platform, dedicated tool), by:

providing industry expertise to help you select your XBRL concepts and define your mapping (table showing XBRL elements, their locations and their attributes);
supporting your communications with auditors;
creating your document in XHTML format;
applying tags and macro-tags to your digital version;
creating and delivering the final submission format (ZIP file).