In South Africa there are only about 100 000 (out of 1,8million) entities that will be required to submit AFS in iXBRL at this stage. They don’t all need to be submitted on 1 July 2018. The company needs to submit their iXBRL within 30 days of the anniversary month of the date of incorporation, with their latest available Annual Financial Statements.
The reasons the CIPC has decided to implement iXBRL are to keep up with how the rest of the world is doing things, and to improve efficiency and effectiveness in collecting and analysing big volumes of data. This will ensure transparency and compliance. The data will be used for research into the big picture of how businesses are doing in SA, and compare business sectors so that struggling industries can be detected early.
The benefits of iXBRL are that investors and stakeholders will have more reliable information and therefore be able to do analysis and decision making faster and more effectively.
Oh and…. What is it? It is standardised digital financial reporting.
The CIPC assure us that all information will be safe and secure so that nobody who is not allowed to look at that information will be able to reach it. They may share the data with anybody they so choose.