SureFile Quality Checks

SureFile Accounts' quality assurance checks have been developed on the basis of deep knowledge and experience of XBRL tagging requirements and the preparation of iXBRL accounts. The checks have been reviewed and refined through testing on a wide variety of accounts.

The checks identify issues which may reflect tagging or accounting errors. The SureFile Assurance Report provides clear guidance on the nature of errors and their location – with location buttons or links pointing wherever possible to the location of the issue in the accounts. (Click Assurance Report Sample to see an annotated example of an assurance report.) Users can then easily review the item and correct it or request a correction by the tagger.

There are two main components to the quality checks:

Numeric and Date Assurance

This covers a range of checks on monetary values, numeric information and dates in accounts to identify incorrect tagging and anomalous values or entries. It can be very hard for manual checks to spot errors on tagging settings on monetary and numeric data – and those errors are easy to make. The numeric and data report provides:

• A summary table containing standard monetary, numeric and percentage settings for the accounts, together with information on the currency and periods covered.
• A monetary exceptions table that lists all monetary items that diverge from the standard scale or decimal settings in the accounts or have settings which lead to loss of accuracy.
• A currency exceptions table that lists any monetary items expressed in a currency other than the main currency for the accounts.
• A numeric exceptions table that lists all non-monetary items that diverge from the standard scale or decimal settings in the accounts or have settings which lead to loss of accuracy.
• A percentage exceptions table that lists any percentage items that appear to have incorrect scale or decimals settings.
• A negated items table that lists all negated items and highlights those which are not normally expected to be reported as negative. This helps identify any incorrectly negated items.
• A date usage and inconsistencies table that lists all the dates in the accounts and any inconsistencies or errors detected.

Accounting Rules

SureFile runs extensive accounting rule checks to detect tagging errors and even possible errors in the accounts themselves.

The accounting rules include "existence" checks to ensure consistency between different accounting entries, whether text or numeric, and "aggregation" checks to highlight calculation inconsistencies within sections of the accounts, which may indicate tagging or accounting errors.

The aggregation checks include checks on 'dimension tagging' which can be difficult to review manually.

The rules cover FRC accounts taxonomies for Full IFRS, FRS101, FRS102, FRS105 and Charities for both the UK and Ireland.

SureFile also covers the basic validation checks used by HMRC, the Irish Revenue and Companies House. It also includes more than 40 additional validation checks applied by Companies House, mainly related to the content of standard declarations in accounts. Breaches of these are highlighted separately in the SureFile Assurance Report.