During a call with a potential client last week, I mentioned that Rivet’s Crossfire Financial Reporting Platform makes numbers so exciting that I want to go back to school for an MBA in Accounting. He laughed and revealed that nowadays, being an accountant is less about numbers or analysis and more about rules and mandates that govern how a number is presented.
This is a sentiment that I hear over and over again from folks working in the modern corporate world. That’s why I can understand how the recent XBRL mandate can be positioned as part of a long list of regulations that turn accountants into law enforcers. But this assumption severely undermines the ability of XBRL to transform the financial reporting and analysis inside an organization; XBRL isn’t only about financial transparency for outsiders or Street analysts, it’s about the financial transparency within an organization.
The XBRL mandate is here, though, and the first step is to ensure compliance with the SEC. But we at Rivet also know the extraordinary benefits that XBRL can have for an organization. That’s why our Solution for SEC Corporate Filers minimizes the compliance burden and maximizes the benefit for an organization, all while keeping the customer in control.
One concern that comes up frequently from our clients is how to really be sure that the XBRL files produced will be blessed and accepted by the SEC. The validation tool in our product happens to be a beneficiary of Rivet’s 5 years and 100,000+ hours of experience with XBRL. Rivet’s developers, QA team and Professional Services team have been meticulous in their research and integration of the EGDAR manual and XBRL specifications. I have even seen one particular QA Manager with the EDGAR manual on in her kitchen! The validation tool in the Compliance Package runs the documents through three levels of validation: XBRL 2.1 specifications, EDGAR requirements and taxonomy calculation. And because the Crossfire products are web delivered, any updates from the SEC or XBRL US are quickly integrated into the validation tool and no software updates or installs are required by the user. This is just one of the ways that the Crossfire Financial Reporting Platform aims to make accountants’ lives a little easier.
I have also heard again and again from clients that while undergoing the XBRL vendor evaluation process, they couldn’t help but wonder if and how XBRL could be beneficial for them. Rivet has a way to make XBRL work for you. The Compliance Package includes an easy to use Excel add in which allows the user to pull all XBRL filings to the SEC into a spreadsheet to slice and dice to the heart’s content. Within seconds (not hours), our customers create KPIs, benchmark reports or any other kind of analysis one can think of. They can compare an internal quarter filing to competitors’ before it even goes live. They can create bar charts in Excel using publicly filed data without ever having to comb through their own or a competitor’s financials. In fact, Crossfire emails them an alert any time a particularly interesting data field is updated. Seriously!
Rather than becoming a compliance burden, the XBRL mandate has allowed Rivet’s clients to drastically improve and revolutionize their internal reporting processes, leaving them more time for analysis. With all of the slicing and dicing made possible by Crossfire, I might get that MBA in accounting after all.
Tags: Compliance, crossfire, EDGAR, reporting, XBRL
