Here at Rivet we specialize in Financial Content Management (FCM). FCM encompasses financial reporting and consolidations (supporting the internal close), submission of XBRL filings (supporting the external close) and new ways of peer group benchmarking (leveraging publicly available XBRL data feeds e.g. from the S.E.C.).
However in most organizations, FCM is not an holistic task managed by a single team. These processes are ‘siloed’ – managed by separate teams or individuals using separate applications. But transformational CFOs should be looking ahead to when XBRL becomes the glue that unifies all these processes together. When all three teams work with a single financial content management application. Or even better, a single FCM team works with a single FCM application.
Content management is a term traditionally associated with managing the variety of content that makes up a modern website: pages, images, AV clips, links, documents etc. Financial Content Management simply borrows the concept and applies it to the finance domain to recognize the variety of financial content that many organizations either create or consume or both, including: statements and consolidations, worksheets, supporting schedules, audit reports, regulatory filings, (and now) XBRL data feeds.
At the moment, if you were to view financial management software through an FCM ‘lens’, you might see at least four application domains:
- Applications focused on creating financial statements and consolidations
- Applications focused on creating external regulatory filings in XBRL
- Applications focused on consuming new XBRL data streams
- Applications focused on creating and consuming document management
You might even be using 4 or more tools for these purposes right now. But essentially you are only using multiple tools because there is no common denominator between them. They all depend on different kinds of data that applications and are forced to process this data in different ways.
Financial reporting data typically comes from GL/ERP databases or Excel spreadsheets and CSV files extracted from these databases. External filing generation requires the integration of supporting Word documents and PDFs. XBRL feeds are a new source of financial content to add into the mix and then there are all the documents that surround these core financial processes (e.g. governance or audit related).
But it’s all financial content of one sort or another. Content that benefits from being aggregated in one place so it can managed holistically, published in a multiplicity of formats and worked on by multiple teams or individuals for different purposes.
Today, in the USA at least, XBRL is primarily an output format – e.g. to create a mandated 10Q/K filing. But this is not what XBRL is really about. XBRL’s value as a financial content unifier comes when it is also a pervasive input format. When financial data flows from GL/ERP systems pre-tagged and when documents like audit reports and supporting schedules are also saved, not just as Word docs or PDFs, but also as XBRL instance documents.
In this scenario what a FCM application ‘sees’ is not lots of different types of data to turn into content but a consistent kind of data to work with. Now, financial reporting supply chains will become ‘tagged data flows’ – focused on re-purposing this tagged data to create different kinds of content output and on creating linkages between the tagged data (not documents) so that traceability and auditability of the overall financial content set is improved.
Once XBRL has transitioned to become an output and an input format, many of today’s disjointed financial processes will inevitably become joined up and support what some people call ‘straight-through processing’. Starting from transaction posting in a sub-ledger and going all the way through to peer group comparisons of publicly available filing data.
Today you can use a Rivet application to support your external close to generate SEC filings; or to support your internal close to do financial reporting and consolidations; or to pull in XBRL data to do peer group comparisons. But did you realize that you can use a single Rivet application to do all three? To create and consume all three kinds of content?
Financial content management is about collecting all kinds of internally and externally sourced financial data into a single repository and allowing financial professionals to create all kinds of financial content from this powerful aggregation of data. We see XBRL as the underlying standard that will help to unify all this financial content, join up the processes and breakdown the silos. Of course it will take more time to realize this vision but our FCM applications are already in place to support you on the journey.
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