Part 2: How Rivet’s Dragon View can help companies benchmark against other SEC filers
Out of the 10,000+ reporting elements available from the US GAAP taxonomy, how do you know that your company has picked reporting elements consistently used by other SEC filers? Or reporting elements used by SEC filers that are in the same industry as your company?
If you put on a reviewer’s hat, it might interest you to see how other filing companies have selected which reporting elements to use. Rivet discussed this “benchmark” concept with all the major accounting firms, and they agreed that the benchmark capability would be beneficial to companies and both internal and external reviewers. It would be especially useful if a company could compare their reporting element selections to the companies in their industry.
We are not suggesting that you should simply go with the flow and choose reporting elements based on judgments from other companies. Our belief is that if there is an easy way for you to benchmark against other filing companies, it might give you and your internal/external reviewers additional comfort knowing that the reporting elements you chose are comparable with other SEC filing companies.
Dragon View Spring Release, we have upgraded the Instance Document Information screen to give a highly summarized view of the XBRL documents being reviewed.
Let’s take a look at the summary information for a sample filing.
The company has used mostly “base” reporting elements (elements defined in the US GAAP taxonomy), and has only extended two elements on their own. No red light there. Furthermore, there are 26 out of 95 (27.4%) elements that were used by fewer than 25% of the SEC filers, but none of the elements selected has fewer than 25% usage by the companies in their industry. The benchmark results looked quite good, but it might worth the effort to take a look at the elements that were not commonly used by SEC filers.
If you decided to review more details, Dragon View Spring Release enables you to quickly narrow down the reporting elements that only fewer than 25% of the SEC filers have chosen. You just need to click on “custom” filter for the “Percentage of All SEC Filers” and specify that you want to see in this case, reporting elements that have a low usage percentage. If desired, you can open other companies’ filings and examine the elements selected to compare with your choices.
Dragon View is designed to refresh SEC/SIC usage data from our website in near real-time (every 30 minutes), so you can always have the most up to date statistical information available.
In the next version of Dragon View, we would go even further to “suggest” reporting elements that can be substituted when the usage percentage is low based on various search criteria.
For filing companies, compliance doesn’t stop at providing valid filings to the SEC; it also means that you are able to have confidence that the judgments in selecting the reporting elements can be validated and both internal and external reviewers have the tools to help companies make corrections when necessary. We are delighted that Dragon View is able to provide added benefits to help our customers feel confident and make intelligent, informed judgments.
You can find a detailed description of Dragon View on our website: Dragon View Features and Benefits.
If you like to see a recorded demo, you can download the Free Dragon View Online Demo.
Tags: Compliance, Customer, Dragon View
