Accounting rules reporting improved
We have made significant improvements to the way in which Accounting Rules are reported in Assurance Reports.
From the outset, in order to support and streamline our customers' quality assurance processes, SureFile was designed to only report exceptions that must or might need attention (depending on category) to improve quality, thus keeping the 'signal-to-noise' ratio high. Published filing rules for HMRC, Companies House and the IRC, and technical tagging requirements for Inline XBRL itself, are relatively static and well known, so flagging violations and staying relatively silent about the rules that pass makes sense.
However, it has become apparent that in the more fluid world of accounting rules exception reporting is only part of the picture. Accounts vary enormously in content and coverage, and not all rules are applied to all accounts. It is also important to know which rules have been successfully applied, as well as those which indicate some kind of issue that may need to be addressed. We have always provided summary information that includes the number of rules passed, but until now we haven't explicitly reported the outcome of each rule. That has now changed.
With immediate effect we are pleased to announce that the Accounting Rules sections of Assurance Reports generated by SureFile Accounts will optionally be able to show the outcome of all the rules applied, though the existing behaviour is still the default. If exceptions are of primary importance to you then you can continue to use the Assurance Reports in that way, but for a comprehensive view of the outcome of all accounting rules applied to your accounts ticking a simple checkbox will reveal all, on a report-by-report basis.
We hope that this new feature will help preparers to better understand the quality of their tagging overall - not just in situations where there is an apparent issue.
