Some very interesting facts can be buried in SEC filing footnotes – like those dug up by Michelle Leder at footnoted.org in her post Voting is now open for the worst footnote of 2009. But did you know that one of the features (ahem) buried in Crossfire is footnote exhumation?
Footnote exhumation means surfacing the footnotes associated with an SEC XBRL filing. You can already view the text of XBRL tagged footnotes in CrossView – for example the screenshot below shows a note from a recent quarterly filing by Apple noting the costs of Steve Job’s private jet use.
But in Crossfire you can set text-based rules to do the digging for you and automatically surface notes that are of specific interest to you. So if you were tracking corporate yacht use, then using the term ‘yacht’ as a search term for a rule could have dug up the fascinating footnote that Michelle found:
InfoGroup saying the cost of the yacht for former CEO Vinod Gupta was really $873,078 instead of the zero that it had previously reported.
I think we’d all like to know where to buy yachts for $0!
Obviously surfacing footnotes is not only about trains and boats and planes, there’s lots of treasure buried in them thar footnotes. Some of which – like deferred revenues or litigation – might be directly relevant to your business, your supply chain or your competitors. The good news is that now this information can be a lot more transparent thanks to XBRL, CrossView and Crossfire.
Tags: crossfire, CrossView, Footnotes
