With the SEC’s final ruling on XBRL issued earlier this year, the commission made a decision that a filer’s first year filing shall include the footnotes and financial statement schedules tagged in blocks of text (http://www.sec.gov/rules/final/2009/33-9002fr.pdf pg 7, but labeled as pg 6781). This decision greatly simplifies the tagging process in the first year. In subsequent years, each filer will be required to create a more detailed filing but that’s a subject for another day. Let me show you how easy it is to create text blocks for your notes using Rivet Dragon Tag and CrossTag software.
Dragon Tag
Dragon Tag is an add-on to Word and Excel. Since most companies will already have their notes to the financial statements in Word, this is a very simple process. Simply find the correct element using our powerful taxonomy search engine (see Tag it Your Way! for more on “search”) and drag it to the selected note in the document. It’s as easy as 1, 2, 3 as shown in the following screen shots.
CrossTag
CrossTag is independent of Word and Excel but works nicely with both. For this example, we’ll assume the notes are in a Word document. The steps involve creating a template which can be re-used each quarter, so this part of the process only needs to be done once. After that, it’s just a matter of changing the date on the template and copying and pasting the text from Word into the source document. The steps are illustrated in the following screen shots.
Preview
In either Dragon Tag or CrossTag, the end result is the same: you’ll have nicely formatted notes. You can easily see the end result using the preview feature in either Dragon Tag or CrossTag. Preview lets you see what your filing looks like on the SEC site without actually having to upload your filing to the site. Rivet built the rendering engine used by the SEC so what you see in preview using our products is the same as what you would see on the SEC preview site. However, if you want to double check, the SEC allows you to preview your filing through the XBRL Previewer located at https://ideapreview.sec.gov/previewer/. Here’s a screen shot of what my instance document looks like there.
As a side note, if you don’t use Rivet products to create XBRL filings, you may be interested in Dragon View which is a tool you can use to preview your filing, compare your filing with others from the same industry or across all industries, and view detailed information about your filing and taxonomy (see http://www.rivetsoftware.com/Products/Dragon_View/Default.aspx). We work hard at Rivet, creating products that take the complexity out of XBRL so you can create professional filings yourself. But remember, if you do get stuck, we’re available to walk you through the process.
Tags: CrossTag, Dragon Tag, Footnotes, Products
