Exploring the Playbook 4: How can I help smaller entities participate effectively in digital reporting?
XBRL International’s Regulatory Playbook is now available. It offers regulators an essential guide to planning and implementing an XBRL-based digital reporting framework, including key considerations and best practices drawn from international experience. To celebrate the launch, this series will dive into a few of the questions that regulators often ask themselves, and that the playbook helps to answer.
Without data, no reporting project is going anywhere. If you’re a regulator implementing digital reporting, engaging your reporting entities and supporting them to produce timely, high-quality digital disclosures will be essential to success. The Playbook explores the strategies you need for raising awareness, delivering the right resources, maintaining open communication, implementing feedback mechanisms, and offering targeted support throughout the reporting process.
Different reporting frameworks vary widely in scope: depending on your supervisory needs and local context, you might want to collect data from only the largest listed companies, all registered companies in your jurisdiction, or somewhere in between. (And if you’re interested in learning more about how a comprehensive national reporting framework can provide a rich decision-making resource for multiple users, Data Amplified 2026 will take a deep dive into the Netherland’s model for open data as public infrastructure. Join us in The Hague, 26-17 October.)
Smaller entities can be an important part of the picture, but they also tend to need extra support from regulators. They typically lack dedicated IT staff or compliance specialists, and they may struggle to absorb even very small additional reporting costs. They are more easily overwhelmed by complex new requirements, and more concerned about compliance risks.
The Playbook discusses the ways that regulators can lower the barriers to adopting digital reporting and create an easier pathway for smaller entities, including:
- creating a dedicated, simplified policy framework and corresponding taxonomy, focused exclusively on the information required from smaller entities
- providing user-friendly XBRL reporting software, and the factors to consider in leveraging in-house, vendor partnership and open-source approaches
- developing training and support infrastructure to build competence and confidence, tailored to the needs of smaller entities
A successful, sustainable digital reporting framework depends on providing the right support for your unique community of reporting entities. That means thinking beyond compliance to build collaborative, empowering relationships.
Dive into the Playbook here.
