Standard Business Reporting (SBR) comes into effect in Australia from July 2010, but there are some differences in the way that the Australian Government is moving forward with XBRL-based financial reporting compared to both the USA and the UK.
The first difference is that it is not being mandated (not yet anyway). In their FAQ, the Australian Govt. expect that “Because it will be cheaper, faster and easier to use, it is expected that SBR will become the channel of choice for reporting to governments.” The second difference is that the SBR website is a pretty good model for clearly communicating what SBR is and how it will work – for all the participating stakeholders. But the third and crucial difference between the SBR initiative and that of the SEC in the USA and HMRC in the UK is that the Australians have recognized the role that a single signon and web services play in this kind of initiative, right from the start.
In the USA and UK, XBRL and iXBRL are positioned as reporting ‘formats’ that XBRL-enabled software ‘outputs’ and organizations file with the regulator via one or more websites. The Australians have moved the vision on one step. They are aiming to introduce the AUSkey, a “single secure sign-on for agencies participating in the SBR program.” This alone will save businesses filing with different agencies a lot of time.
In addition, the SBR program will rely on web services to securely manage the transmission, reciept and acknowledgement of XBRL-based reporting payloads. In this scenario, SBR provides a web service that is consumed by accounting and reporting software. The transmission of SBR reports to the appropriate agency becomes a button-push from your genera ledger or consolidation package and the whole transaction can be managed just like email with an outbox to record business transmissions and an inbox to log agency receipts. There’s nothing new about this. The ecommerce world has been using a version of this paradigm, called EDI, for decades. But the SBR initiative has rightly moved it on into the XBRL reporting world.
Australia’s SBR initiative is notable because it moves the XBRL financial reporting paradigm on a step, by recognizing that XBRL reporting is just another financial transaction between two stakeholders – in this case business and government – that needs to be managed as securely, speedily and seamlessly as possible. So good on ya!
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