Visma Connect and its partner, Dinocrates Group, have been awarded a contract to support the state of Florida in designing and implementing standardized taxonomies for state, county, municipal, and special district financial filings, using XBRL.
In the United States, thousands of governments at the state and local level publish comprehensive financial reports (known as CAFRs) every year. These reports are prepared, for the most part, using a combination of Word and Excel and then exported as PDFs. This makes the data extremely hard to analyze and report on. With the passing of Senate Bill (SB) 1073 in 2018, Florida became the first state to adopt legislature that directly addresses this issue by implementing XBRL. The law requires the state's Chief Financial Officer (CFO) to create an interactive repository of financial statement information. The repository will become known as the Florida Open Financial Statement System. Local governments must report financial data to the CFO using eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) for fiscal years ending on or after September 1, 2022.
Visma Connect is Europe's leader in XBRL. The company led the implementation of Standard Business Reporting (SBR) for the Dutch government and develops and maintains Digipoort, the Dutch government's digital infrastructure for SBR message traffic. This system is used to submit reports to the The Dutch Tax and Customs Administration, the Chamber of Commerce, the Country's Central Bureau for Statistics, and the Social Security Service. In 2018, the infrastructure processed 760,000 business-to-government annual fiscal reports and 39 million messages in annual tax declarations and returns. The same approach is being used to handle 120 million messages for the Netherlands' Customs, Border security, Health & Safety authority.
"We are proud that Dinocrates Group has chosen us for this partnership and that we will lead the modernization of financial reporting in Florida, says René van der Meij, Tribe Lead SBR at Visma Connect. This is a great opportunity to apply our expertise in SBR in a new country. Other states will look to Florida for best practices, so this project is extremely important."
"Dinocrates is excited to partner with Visma Connect," said Jim St.Clair, CTO. "Visma is a leader in Europe in assisting government agencies with Standardized Business Reporting (SBR), and strongly complements our experience in state and local government."