The Companies and Intellectual Property Commission of South Africa (CIPC) is the central government agency responsible for both the registration and regulation of companies in the country. All entities registered in South Africa are required to file financial statements with CIPC, except for those which are exempted. From 1^st July 2018, the CIPC has mandated the submission of Annual Financial Statements including annual returns from qualifying entities in iXBRL (inline eXtended Business Reporting Language) format.

Beneficiaries of XBRL data:

Regulators:

• Greater transparency through ease of analysis of the regulated entities filings
• Increase data accuracy
• Dramatically reduced the time to process filings from weeks to days
• Rise in analyst productivity
• Validate and review data much more efficiently and usefully than they have hitherto been able to do.

Corporate Community:

• Cost savings in preparation, report creation, analysis. High flexibility through the use of dashboard based business rules. This leads to significant savings in man hours and lead time in compliance and consolidation
• Faster availability of data into standard reports
• Extracts data from accounting packages and makes it standardized and portable
• Provides a common framework of definitions
• Easy data handling due to standardization and automation, centralization of delivery
• A pioneering status among enterprises in the use of XBRL. Image enhancement in the marketplace through Increase of quality and consistency of data

Auditors:

• Automate financial statements handling, cutting out time-consuming and costly collation and re-entry of information.
• Accurate and Quality Data
• Facilitates audit trail

Equity Analyst/Investment Banker/Credit Analyst/Investors:

• Easier access to financial data
• Easier analysis and comparison of financial data
• Utilizing a publicly available XBRL database of Risk Return filings or prospectuses, could easily, in a matter of minutes, identify funds for review based upon fund type, return history and expense information
• Simplify the selection and comparison of data, and deepen their company analysis
• Time required for analysis, validation and arranging financial information according to the needs is greatly reduced.