The Cloud Report looks at all rules as well as best practices even though at this time following best practices is not cause for the filing to be rejected. With the 2 year furnishing rule at an end for the Wave 1 filers come June, these best practices will need to be scrutinized in more detail. If the SEC required these best practices, these filings would not have been accepted.

Your XBRL provider should have a validation tool that looks at SEC requirements as they pertain to XBRL 2.1 and EDGAR Filing Manual as well as items that will not cause a filing to be rejected, but would improve the quality of the filing. If you are outsourcing with a third party, they should be evaluating this for you and implementing the best practices, if possible. If you are doing the work yourself, it is important, but not required, that you address these best practices.

Therefore, I understand why companies may evaluate vendors based on the XBRL Cloud. Here at Rivet, we prefer to think of it as a collaboration tool. We hold our clients’ filings in the highest regard and as you can see, through this collaboration, our error rate on the XBRL Cloud has dropped significantly. If companies want to use the XBRL Cloud as an evaluation tool, it would be best to look at the error rate over time for all filings. This would somewhat alleviate the spike for self filers not wanting to clear best practice errors. It will be interesting to see what happens with the Wave 1 XBRL Cloud errors come June. I would anticipate a further drop in the numbers.

Best,
Charlie