ESEF

European Single Electronic Format

ESEF stands for European Single Electronic Format, and is a digital format requirement for annual and consolidated accounts and sustainability reports to be submitted to each country’s control authority. In Sweden, it is the Financial Supervisory Authority.

The ESEF format applies to:

  1. Annual and consolidated accounts of companies with securities listed on a regulated market in the EU.
  2. Sustainability reporting for companies covered by the new Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive ( CSRD).

The introduction of the ESEF format is important for the Transparency Directive and the EU Green Deal. This allows for harmonization of the sustainability information that companies must provide. One of the aims is to ensure that both financial and sustainability information is comparable, accessible and transparent. This in turn is expected to lead to more informed investment decisions that also include sustainability risks. A stated goal is also to facilitate reporting and reduce costs and administration.

ESEF is a technical standard for digital reporting of annual and sustainability reports.

  • The report is prepared in XHTML format, which allows machine reading.
  • Selected facts should be tagged with XBRL tags.
  • The XBRL tags should be integrated into the XHTML document using the Inline XBRL (iXBRL) technology.
  • A major advantage of iXBRL is that the same document can be read by a human in a standard browser while providing structured, machine-readable data. This means high accessibility and gives companies full control over the design and presentation of the information.
  • iXBRL is considered a future-proof format as it is adaptable over time and can handle developments and innovation in electronic reporting.


The ESEF rules were introduced in Sweden from the financial year beginning on or after January 1, 2021 (some other European countries chose to introduce the requirement already from January 1, 2020).

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