Zig: Elevating the Financial Reporting Capabilities of a Best-in-class Real Estate ERP Platform

About the project

Headquartered in The Netherlands, Zig is a leading provider of real estate and property management ERP software, with a unique specialization in social housing.

The Skarp Information Platform from Zig is a fully integrated Business Intelligence (BI) solution built on Microsoft Power BI that is designed to provide Analytics-as-a-Service to Zig customers. It transforms data imports from source systems by applying custom KPIs and metrics to produce high-quality output while also providing feedback on the data quality found in source systems. 

The Dutch government imposes strict financial reporting requirements for ERP platforms that support Social Housing property managers in the real estate sector. These financial reports are defined in the XBRL standard, a powerful standard that can be cumbersome to implement.  

Challenge

The XBRL format is an entirely self-contained format that defines not only the precise structure of the data but also all validation and presentation rules. Each formal definition of one document type starts with an entry point that defines all other dependencies to elements in the data taxonomy. The standard is extensible, and new versions of its rules are published regularly. 

Although it is powerful, XBRL is quite hard to implement in practical ways. There are no available code libraries that allow software providers to easily integrate the standard into their platforms and generate valid XBRL reports.

As a result, the team from HTEC developed an in-house custom solution enabling Zig’s software to generate XBRL reports for several entry points related to financial reporting. The solution had to allow for complex data traceability and audit trails while providing a user experience that was simple and easy to use.

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The XBRL standard has faced challenges in achieving global adoption due to the slow development of off-the-shelf integration tools. Despite being a powerful reporting standard, its complexity has limited its widespread usability. To become proficient in XBRL, practical hands-on experience is key. Engaging in real projects, mapping financial data to XBRL taxonomies, and generating valid XBRL instances are effective ways to deepen understanding. Discovering XBRL’s validation rules is pivotal because it goes beyond its original purpose as a reporting standard, highlighting its self-contained nature and broader applicability. Addressing this challenge, XBLR-Connect from HTEC seeks to bridge the gap for Zig and their customers enabling them to extract the value of XBRL.

– Vladimir Mijić

Application Architect, Senior Software Engineer

Solution

HTEC Group designed and engineered a custom XBRL editor for Zig that is being used to create and edit XBRL documents for any published taxonomy within their ERP platform.

Using a specially created data integration layer editor allows XBRL documents to be generated directly from source data, while empowering users to manually add and modify data that cannot be directly sourced from their systems. The built-in XBRL validation engine serves to interpret new validation rules defined in the taxonomy and outperforms all existing third-party validation systems while delivering full document validation in a matter of seconds. 

Success

The Skarp Information Platform from Zig is now able to offer complete and compliant XBRL reporting to their clients in the real estate and social housing domain.

Additionally, the XBRL editor developed by HTEC was recognized as a significant added value that could stand on its own. As a result, XBLR-Connect was spun out from Zig as a standalone company offering specialized XBRL integrations as a platform in itself. 

With a new team of developers from HTEC partnering with XBLR-Connect, we are now developing a fresh line of applications based on XBRL standards, including a product for SBR Nexus Bank in the Netherlands.  

The XBRL editor developed by HTEC was recognized as a significant added value that could stand on its own. As a result, XBLR-Connect was spun out from Zig as a standalone company offering specialized XBRL integrations as a platform in itself.