Build on XBRL experience

Data accessibility means making your sustainability data easy to see and easy to use. You should plan to make your sustainability disclosures available to not only the regulatory bodies but also to other entities that may be interested in comparing your results with other results. It is important to use a common standard when planning how to report your sustainability data. If companies do not use the same data structures when preparing their reports, it is difficult to analyse and compare the data.

Taxonomies should ensure that the granularity of reported narrative data is at a level where the results are accurate and useful. Sustainability reports can be long and detailed, incorporating a significant number of descriptions and explanations that appear as multiple paragraphs of text. Different sentences or paragraphs answer different questions. One paragraph can answer two different questions, or several paragraphs are needed to answer one question. If the narrative text is not tagged with taxonomy concepts at the correct level of granularity, it is difficult to analyse and find information in the report.

xBRL-JSON is designed to simplify analysis and make XBRL data easy to consume by machines. The xBRL-JSON format is a simpler and more universal representation of sustainability data in XBRL reports that can be used by a range of software tools to analyse reports. When planning XBRL reports you should consider how to publish sustainability data in a digital format so that it can then be fed directly into analytic databases.