Table of Contents

1 Introduction

Business reports typically provide information about the entity preparing the report, for example, a company’s financial statements. In doing so it is common to also include some information about other parties. For example, the report may contain information about subsidiaries and associates of the preparer, transactions with its related parties, and engagement of third parties. We use the term “entity” to refer to all possible types of other party.

As a result, there is a need to identify each of the entities whose data is reported in the preparer’s report. This document discusses the different approaches that can be used when modelling such information in an XBRL taxonomy.

This document is based on current best practice. For example, current best practice is that the context “entityIdentifier” should only be used to identify the preparer of the report.

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2 Structure of the document

This document will discuss various use cases and provide guidance for taxonomy authors on how to implement these use cases.

The appendices contain examples of taxonomies that use the approaches mentioned and a list of other documents that might be useful for people interested in this topic.

The full article is exclusively accessible to members of XBRL International.