On 5 March 2018, at the DiFin Go-Live event held at the Bundesbank’s head office in Berlin, the Deutsche Bundesbank gave the go-ahead for the Digital Financial Report.
An article by Erich Rohland
The digital financial report will be accepted by banks, savings banks and the Bundesbank from 1 April 2018. This involves the submission of annual accounts as commercial balance sheets in XBRL format. Alongside E-Bilanz and the Federal Gazette, it is the third organisation to accept data in this format.
DiFin is coming
When a bank or savings bank grants a loan to a company, it is required by law to assess the borrower’s financial situation. To do this, it needs the company’s annual accounts, which, until now, it has only received in printed form or as a PDF file. Joachim Wuermeling, a member of the Bundesbank’s Executive Board, explained that, in his view, DiFin brings about a significant reduction in the administrative burden involved in preparing and distributing annual accounts, enables banks and savings banks to carry out credit checks more quickly and reliably, and thus improves access to credit for small and medium-sized enterprises.
A key objective is therefore to avoid media discontinuities. Given that banks and building societies audit over a million financial statements each year and the taxonomy that has now been released comprises 7,000 data fields, the impact on the banks is understandable. The project participants and representatives of the German financial sector see a useful further development of the Digital Financial Report, particularly in the form of a feedback channel from the credit institutions back to the preparers of the annual accounts. As an example, they cited the return transmission of interest and repayment schedules.
Get ready for DiFin with Opti.Tax
The DiFin module will soon be available for the Opti.Tax taxonomy software. Based on the annual accounts prepared in Opti.Tax, it will then be possible to submit the digital financial report.
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