Daniel Robert’s recent post Third Tier Filer Options – XBRL does a good job of outlining the three approaches to XBRL filing that face ‘third tier’ or ‘wave three’ filers in the USA. If you read this blog you’ll know that Rivet already occupies a leadership position as a service provider for delivering XBRL filings to the S.E.C. But here I want to propose that despite all that, we agree with the last part of Daniel’s provocative statement :
The one small problem is that the only people providing any education (all those nice free webinars) all have vested interests – to scare the stuffing out of the filers, so that they will outsource the entire process. This is counter productive.
Although we would love to have every filer using our products and services – and we do have a lot of them doing that already – we are not really in the business of scaring the stuffing out of anyone. Nor do we believe the full promise of XBRL will be delivered by outsourcing all your filing – forever. We are trying to help our customers do what they need to do now whilst preparing them for the fourth wave of XBRL, when a tsunami of corporate data (including their own) is available online. This constantly evolving stream of data will sweep away old-style 20th century financial reporting full of PDFs and cuts-and-pastes, to reveal the new world of online RSS-fed comparison sites delivering reports that are no longer compiled from a spaghetti of fragile, error-prone Excel links and formulas but internationally agreed ‘taxonomized’ data.
This is when the game moves on from simply converting a Word document into an XBRL document just to ‘do’ compliance, from after-the-fact report tagging to on-entry transaction tagging, from taxonomy silos to connected and inter-related taxonomy networks – fundamental changes that will help to drive a deeper and wider perspective of every organization’s performance.
What matters to the next generation of wave 4 filers is:
- How do I leverage XBRL to go beyond compliance and use it to power the kind of analytics that can materially improve the performance of my business?
- Why am I buying software that assumes I want to continue to shuffle documents around rather than incrementally build an XBRL-powered information repository to help me gain insight from my data?
- Who is going to help me get some ROI from all my compliance effort?
If we want to knock the stuffing out of anyone, it is only to make sure our customers are limbered up and ready to surf the fourth wave as it gathers momentum out there in the deep ocean – so they don’t end up bypassed and bobbing around in the shallows, helplessly watching their peers as they power away into the distance.
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