Who files financial statements in iXBRL in Ukraine and by when

The iXBRL format entered Ukrainian law not as a technical whim but as a way to make financial statements machine readable. The catch is that the obligation to file in this format is written as a reference to several categories of companies, and a company can easily find itself on the list only after the deadline has passed. Below: who files, where, by what date and why filings are usually sent back.

What iXBRL is and how it differs from ordinary statements

XBRL is the international standard for machine readable financial reporting. The leading i stands for inline: the figures are tagged inside a document that a person still reads as ordinary statements while software reads it as structured data. It is not an extra file alongside the report, it is the same report in which every number carries a taxonomy element.

A taxonomy is the dictionary of those elements. Ukraine uses the UA IFRS taxonomy, which has two branches: a general one and a separate one for banking and insurance. That is why an insurer’s statements and a manufacturer’s statements are tagged differently even though the standard is the same.

Who has to file in iXBRL

Article 12-1 of the Accounting and Financial Reporting Act requires financial and consolidated financial statements to be filed in the single electronic format based on the taxonomy by:

• public interest entities;
• public joint stock companies;
• business entities operating in extractive industries;
• companies engaged in activities listed by the Cabinet of Ministers.

Around five thousand Ukrainian companies fall under these criteria. The key point is that the obligation is tied not to a company’s preference but to whether it prepares IFRS statements. If it does, iXBRL is mandatory. We covered who exactly has to apply international standards separately: who reports under IFRS.

Where the filing goes

Statements are filed on the Financial Reporting System portal. The portal works as a single window: a company files one package and the system distributes it to the state authorities. Registration on the portal is required before the first filing, and it is a separate step worth taking early rather than in the final week.

The deadlines that drive the whole schedule

The filing date follows the deadline for publishing annual statements together with the auditor’s report, and that differs by category:

• public interest entities (other than large companies that are not securities issuers), public joint stock companies, natural monopolies on the national market and extractive industry companies publish statements with the auditor’s report no later than 30 April of the following year;
• large companies that are not securities issuers publish statements with the auditor’s report no later than 1 June;
• parent companies of a large group that are not themselves large companies publish consolidated IFRS statements also no later than 1 June.

One point is regularly underestimated: publishing financial statements without an auditor’s report counts as not publishing at all. If the statements are filed on time while the audit is still running, the obligation is not met. Audit and filing therefore have to be planned on one timeline rather than in sequence.

Why filings are sent back

In our experience most rejections concern the tagging, not the accounting. The most common causes:

• a taxonomy element chosen for a similar name but a different meaning;
• mandatory context fields left empty: period, currency, unit of measure;
• note totals that do not agree with the primary statements because the notes were tagged separately;
• missing comparative figures for the prior period;
• only the primary statements tagged, with the notes left as plain text.

The last one is the most expensive. The taxonomy covers the notes as well, and that is exactly where mismatches appear. Tagging with a minimum set of tags will pass validation formally but will not survive a substantive review.

What to do if this is your first year on the list

The sequence is straightforward and worth starting before the end of the first quarter. First check whether you are required to prepare IFRS statements. If the books are kept under national standards you need a conversion to IFRS, which is the longest stage. Then register on the portal, arrange the IFRS audit, and only then do the iXBRL tagging, because the auditor may still change the figures.

If time is already short, outsourcing the tagging and filing is the safer route: preparing and filing statements in iXBRL normally takes five to ten working days, whereas learning the taxonomy in house stretches over months.