The benefits include the ability to create a report in seconds that can compare your company to all of the companies in your SIC groups or specific companies that you consider peers/competitors. Users create this report with three simple clicks.  They drag on the statement from the base elements.  They drag on the calendar.  They then drag on the SIC they want to see.  After performing some optional formatting, you can produce a report similar to the following but for your industry.

Another example is where you want to create a report only showing you 2 or 3 selected competitors.  This report is twice as hard as it takes 6 clicks.  Drag on the reporting elements, drag on the calendar. And then drag a company into column C, column D, and column E. After performing some optional formatting and adding excel charts and graphs, you can produce a report similar to the following but for companies you selected.

Rivet provides the ability to get at the data and bring this data into Excel.  Once the data is in Excel, we all have Excel gurus who can do magic with the data at this point.  We have had customers tell us that they never knew it could be so easy to gather so much data about their competitors in such a short time.

Our customers can also pick a single company and with a single click, see their specific filing including the income statement, balance sheet and the ability to see notes and disclosures.   Users can do this with a single click.  Select the report or disclosure for a company and then drag it onto the grid.

So the next time you hear somebody remark that they do not see the benefit of XBRL, you will know  they have been focusing on tagging and not the simplicity of analyzing data with the right product.  Rivet’s solution can turn a task into opportunity for companies to be globally competitive.

Actually, with Rivet’s Crossfire product, customers are creating these reports during the demo and then with our relative date features, the report updates itself whenever there is a new filing on the SEC website.

I have done a lot of demos in my day.  I have attended many seminars where they say you need to get the customer involved.  Well we have taken this lesson to a whole new level.  Lauri Harrison, our Director of Marketing, watched a demo and heard a customer remark that report design looks so easy.  She made a suggestion to me that we pass control to the customer and allow them to create reports during the demo. Within a few seconds, customers have created reports similar to the following.

I must say that I was a little skeptical at first.  I was thinking that customers would never accept control, but to my surprise, over half of the customers have taken me up on the offer.  It is very interesting, because after we show them the basics, we let them determine what data they want to see and then we just tell them where to click.  We have had clients create reports like the one above.  We have had clients see a competitor and tell us they want to see more about that company. We have had clients consolidate extended elements with base elements.  We even had one client, who just simply wanted to read through every disclosure about a competitor.

It has been a lot of fun.  I am usually scheduled for 10 to 15 demos a week and I have never like canned demos.  This way of demoing is as far from a canned demo as you can get.  You never know what or where a client will click.

The next time you are curious about how other companies are performing.  Schedule a Crossfire demo with Rivet and see how easy it is to find out about your competition.  It only takes a minute and you can be in the driver’s seat.

With the pressure of smaller reporting windows, more scrutiny on what’s reported and more reporting required in XBRL, getting information from different systems accurately, quickly and smoothly is key to successful work flow management for reporting in XBRL.

If your business is considering a strategic reporting solution that includes XBRL, there are several questions you should be thinking about:

• Will we need to manually re-key or transfer the same information into different modules and applications?

• Is the software accurate, easy-to-use, simple to install and cost-effective?

• Will the system really improve productivity?

• Will the system keep up with changing SEC rulings and changes in XBRL technology?

• Can the system keep up with the growth of our company?

• Can we meet all our current practices with one software supplier?

In considering these questions, it’s worth remembering that many financial reporting processes are far from perfect. Some businesses have to re-enter data from one system to another, or re-key data from one module to another. Both of these practices introduce possibilities for error. Other possible areas for errors are mathematical errors in spreadsheets used to stage data or clerical errors introduced when reviewing reports.

Data integrators and adapters that transfer data automatically, accurately and quickly between systems can reduce or eliminate these errors. They do this by minimizing the opportunity for human error to creep into the process.  Controls can also be put in the workflow to check and catch large variances before transactions are posted between systems  and to report these possible concerns as part of the oversight of the work flow process.

In Rivet’s Controller Package, our integrators and adapters (the components that are configured to transfer data between two systems) have the ability to interface with different ERP, GL and CPM systems and transfer the data right down to the transaction detail level. This eliminates the need to re-enter information across systems or modules, minimizes the potential for error and greatly improves data accuracy.

We bring this all together in an interface very similar to Excel. This interface is where XBRL tags are applied to the data in reusable templates and this is also where the financials will be generated for output in XBRL. These templates only need updating each period with the new reporting periods. So they can be used again and again to generate financials in XBRL, once the new financial data for the period is imported. Because the templates are created with our web-based products, they are automatically updated with any new or amended SEC and XBRL rule changes, removing another administrative burden, adding essential reassurance and further improving process productivity.

You can’t always control what you have to do, but with the help of Controller’s data adapters and integrators you can control how you do it. These components may not be as alluring as fancy reports and visual charts but they reduce errors by removing the need to re-key data, they provide reassurance that your data is compliant with the latest rules and regulations and they improve the productivity of your overall XBRL reporting process.

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.

Find

CrossView makes it easy to navigate the financial ecosystem of SEC filers so you can quickly find the report you are looking for:

CrossView Find

View

CrossView makes it easy to view individual reports in a filing submission and switch between reports from multiple filing entities.

CrossView View

Manage

Once you have found and are viewing the report you want to analyze, CrossView lets you manage the report using a one-click toolbar.

CrossView Manage

CrossView is a great way to get familiar with the financial information ecosystem that the SEC is building by means of the XBRL filing initiative. Using CrossView gives you some idea of the kind of transparency that is possible when you have a wealth of standardized financial information that is easy to find, view and manage online.

We have lots of exciting ideas for future releases of CrossView. But right now the best thing to do is get on over and use CrossView for yourself. It’s online and it’s free.

I recently received an email forwarded by our VP of Sales. In the email, a valuable partner said, “Our customers have asked how we can help them fulfill their XBRL website posting requirement, including providing a human readable view of the XBRL files if desired. We have customers getting ready to live-file their August 10-Qs in XBRL and they’d like to be proactive and have all their ducks in a row and ready for the website posting requirement that will also kick in with their August filings.”

I know why this email was sent to me, and it put a smile on my face. When developing software, you ALWAYS, ALWAYS think that you are designing the features the customers would need and love, but you can’t always get them right. It’s so good to know that you have designed solutions that solve your customers’ problems.

If you are not familiar with the XBRL website posting requirement, here is a quick explanation.

In the new Dragon View Spring Release, we have upgraded the “report preview” to use the new XBRL rendering engine that Rivet has created for the SEC’s website in December 2008. We want our customers to have the confidence of knowing what their filings will look like before they submit to the SEC.

We didn’t stop at being able to display a human readable format; we also created an export feature that saves all of the reports and creates an HTML Reporting Book. To fulfill the website posting requirement, a customer needs to post the XBRL data (the company extension taxonomy and instance document). At the same time, to provide a friendlier version of the XBRL data, they simply needs to copy the HTML Reporting Book to their website. Problem solved. Most customers we talked to understand that they only NEED to post the XBRL files, but a lot of they WANT to also post the human-readable HTML files for their investors.

Here is a sample HTML Reporting Book. I took the reporting book created from Dragon View, and manually added a company logo and a chart to demonstrate that filing companies can very easily modify the look and feel of the reporting book before posting on their own website. Of course, customization is completely optional.

For filing companies, compliance doesn’t stop at providing valid documents to the SEC; it also means meeting the web posting requirements. We are delighted that Dragon View is able to provide added benefits to help our customers fulfill this requirement painlessly. As I said, it’s really good to know that the products we’re designing are able to deliver on the promise we made to ourselves, which is simply to design features customers will need and love.

You can find a detailed description of Dragon View on our website: Dragon View Features and Benefits.

If you would like to see a recorded demo, you can download the Free Dragon View Online Demo.

There’s a lot of talk out there about how difficult XBRL is and how companies should not try to prepare their own filings but instead outsource it. We at Rivet Software work hard to make products that take the complexity out of XBRL so that you can do your filings in-house. One of the ways we do that is by hiring people like me, a CPA who understands financial reporting and how to create tools that are easy for non technical professionals to use.

Another way we do that is by including a robust validation engine with both of our tagging products – Dragon Tag and CrossTag. What validation does is make you aware of any problems your filing has before submitting to EDGAR. Our validation engine incorporates the XBRL rules pertaining to SEC filings as specified in the March 2009 EDGAR Manual (Version 11) which means that we will warn you if you are doing something that is out of compliance with the latest rules (for users not filing with the SEC, don’t worry, we only apply SEC validation against SEC filings so you won’t be bothered with unnecessary errors).

When you create an instance document with Dragon Tag or CrossTag, there are many XBRL errors you’ll never encounter. So I’ll focus on a few of the errors and warnings you are most likely to see.

Please remember that I can’t possibly explain how to resolve all the errors/warnings you may encounter in this blog posting but I can point you to something better: our professional services team. If you get stuck, just give us a call and speak to an experienced professional.

When Validation is Performed — On-Demand and Just-in-Time

First, let me give you some added comfort by explaining when validation is performed. Both products give you the option to perform validation on demand. In other words, just click a button and the instance doc will be validated and a window will pop up showing the errors and warnings. But, we don’t just rely on the user clicking validation. We also perform validation before report preview is run and before a filing package can be created. So if there is a fatal error in your filing and you forget to run validation on your own, the products will automatically run validation and will not let you proceed without fixing certain errors. That should give you some peace of mind.

Validation Error Types

Let’s get into the types of errors you will see. There are three main types of errors: XBRL errors, SEC related errors, and calculation errors.

XBRL Errors

XBRL errors come about because something in the filing does not agree with the XBRL specifications. There is no need for a normal user to get into them – you’re better off leaving that geeky stuff to us – but when you see these errors, rest assured that they are easy for you to fix. For example, each fact must have a date associated with it to give it the proper context. If you don’t have a date, you’ll get a red error listing the element and the message saying “Cannot find a valid reporting period”. Another example is most elements require a unit such as USD or Share. If no unit type is specified, you’ll get a validation error saying so.

These more serious errors are shown in red and listed at the top of the validation error list. These errors pertain to a nonconformance with XBRL standards and must be fixed before a filing can be created. The less serious grey ones may or may not need to be fixed. But, to be on the safe side, it would be good practice to fix all errors and warnings that are consistent with your filing agency’s rules.

SEC Errors

SEC errors and warnings are the ones spelled out in the EDGAR manual. These errors will not prevent you from creating an instance document for filing, but you will be warned before creating a filing that there are errors in the instance document. The difference between SEC errors and warnings is that an SEC error will prevent the filing from going through the EDGAR system while a warning will not. Here’s a list of some common SEC related errors and how to resolve them (I have not included any warnings on this list).

Calculation Errors

Another common error you’ll encounter is a calculation error. Let me provide some background on XBRL to explain this. The beauty of XBRL is that it is multi-dimensional. It’s not just used to report facts but it also is used to present those facts in the way the user intends and to verify the integrity of relationships within those facts. So if you are reporting sales of 100 minus cost of goods sold of 75 and gross profit of 25, XBRL can actually validate that these numbers add up.

This can be a blessing and a curse. A blessing because it ensures the integrity of the calculation relationships but a curse because you may see many errors that may not really be an issue with your filing. The problem is the base US GAAP taxonomy. It is very complex and includes many, many calculation relationships that may not apply to your financial statement. So you will get calculation errors. To resolve them, you have to change the relationships to be the way you want them. This can easily be done using our products and I’ll explain how below.

For example, say you get a calculation error that says “Calculation error for summation item Row 5 Column 2 – Accounts Payable and Accrued Liabilities, Current 650 does not match calculated total 850″

The first thing to do is switch to Calculation View so you can see the calculation relationships. At first, you may find it awkward looking at the taxonomy this way. But there are just two things you need to understand.

1. The parent is supposed to always equal the sum of its children.
2. A calculation weight exists for each element telling the system whether to add or subtract that particular element in calculating the total.

The screen shot below shows the calculation view of the balance sheet. From it we can see that the element that has the error, “Accounts Payable and Accrued Liabilities, Current”, is parent to “Taxes Payable, Current”. For this filing, we have made the decision that we don’t want Taxes Payable to roll up into Accounts Payable and Accrued Liabilities. We just want it to roll up to current liabilities.

To fix this, simply drag “Taxes Payable, Current” on top of “Accounts Payable and Accrued Liabilities, Current”. You’ll then get a prompt asking if you want this element to be “after”, “before” or “a child of” the Accounts payable element. Elect to put it after the element. The below screen shot shows what the taxonomy tree looks like after making that move. It shows that “Taxes Payable, Current” is no longer a child of “Accounts Payable and Accrued Liabilities, Current” but is still a child of “Liabilities, Current”.

Once you’ve made that change, you will no longer have that calculation error. I hope this discussion on validation helps make your XBRL tagging and filing experience smoother and remember we are available for questions through our response line. Go to http://www.rivetsoftware.com/Customer_Support/Default.aspx for contact information.

As a CPA and since joining the Rivet team two years ago, I’ve come to appreciate the time commitment required to file your 10-Q’s and 10-K’s in XBRL format.  Our objective is to make this process as easy as possible with intuitive, easy-to-use tools that are loaded with time saving features.

Take, for instance, the “Help Me Tag” feature that’s new in the spring 2009 release of CrossTag.  If you’ve ever tried to locate a specific element in the US GAAP Taxonomy, you’ve probably come away a little frustrated.  Navigating through it is like trying to find your soul mate at a singles bar.  You know what you’re looking for but can’t seem to find the right one.

What the “Help Me Tag” feature does for you is a little like what “E-Harmony” did for dating.  Based on a 64-point personality profile, no just kidding, but based on the criteria you select, a sophisticated search engine returns a list of matches, ranked highest to lowest.

Additionally, in an effort to help you pick the right element, we show you what other companies are using in their filings by SEC filings in general, or if you want industry specific data, by SIC.   Take a look at the following screen shot to get an idea of what I’m talking about.

Figure 1 Example of “Help Me Tag”

In the above example, the user was looking for a match to “Operating Income” in the US-GAAP Taxonomy.  The search came back showing “Operating Income (Loss), Total” as the most likely match with an 82.5% probability.  The SEC % column shows that 70.1% of SEC filers used that element and the SIC % column shows that 44.4% of Crude Petroleum and Natural Gas companies (the SIC selected) used that element.  So as you can see, this feature can greatly reduce the time spent searching for the right element.

Like I said earlier, you can tag it your way using our products.  This means you can start the tagging process with what you already have – financial statements in Excel format.  Since Dragon Tag is an Excel add-in, you can start tagging with your existing Excel spreadsheets.  CrossTag, however, is independent of Excel so what we’ve done is added an import feature which allows you to bring the entire excel workbook into CrossTag with the click of a button.

Figure 2 – Example of an imported financial statement from Excel

The great thing about this is that we can use your existing financial statement line items to modify the XBRL labels in the base US GAAP Taxonomy so the end result is an XBRL financial statement that looks the same as your existing printed financial statement.  Again, we can do this with the click of a button using the “Update Taxonomy” feature.

This feature allows you to update the taxonomy labels to the labels YOU are using which shifts a lot of tedious work out of your hands to our tool.  An added benefit is that the final review process becomes a lot easier when the labels in XBRL and in the printed financials match.

Figure 3 – Before running “Update Taxonomy” your label and the taxonomy’s label differ

Figure 4 – After running “Update Taxonomy” the labels now match

These are just a couple of the many ways our tools can save you time in the tagging process and help you produce accurate XBRL financial statements that reflect the way you present your company’s data.   You can tag it your way!

How product innovation is combined with feedback from customers – the evolution of CrossTag for XBRL tagging

In my last entry, I talked about how customer feedback was incorporated into the product. However, we try to balance feedback from customers in conjunction with product ideas that we think would benefit our users

In the spring release we have several new features that we would like to enhance (based you’re your feedback) over the next 6 to 9 months. We are introducing the following:

• Workflow

• Automation via import from Excel

• Hierarchies for dimensional tagging

• Tagging assistance features including comparisons of tags from other filers

• Enhanced search and help me tag

Now, we could follow the traditional way of developing software and think through all the possible scenarios for each of these features, develop these features, go through a process of cutting the items that we do not have time to complete, and finally deliver one (maybe two) of the above features sometime in 2010.

However, with Agile development, we include all of these feature in our CrossTag Spring Release. We try to deliver a feature that has enough functionality to solve some of your basic issues. For example, in this release, we provide tagging assistance to assist when you are tagging an element. This tagging assistance will include the number of filers who are also tagging using that element (patent pending). See the screenshot below:

Now we know and have discussed a number of other uses for this feature. For example, we could:

• Add peer group %’s

• Include this in the in-use elements

• Include this in the markup report (which we did)

• Include this in Dragon View

• Include this in Dragon Tag

• Drilldown to see what companies make up the 57.5% number

• Etc, etc

Instead, we keep this somewhat basic, but very useful. We then listen to our customers and, based upon this feedback, incorporate enhancements into the summer or fall release of CrossTag or our other products.

This results in a win-win situation for Rivet and for yourself.

Customers win in the short term because they have five new features that they can use immediately rather than one feature with all the bells and whistle that they can use in 2010.

Customers win in the long term because they can use the feature and thus provide better feedback. Only the development work that is going to have actual benefit is performed. You will see the features enhanced over the next few releases, thus making their experience in 2009 that much better.

Rivet software wins because we keep our development costs low as we did not develop every variation of the feature imaginable for a product. We might just discover that customers do not use the feature they way we had imagined (or worse yet, they do not like the feature at all).  If very little or no feedback is provided, or the feature is not as useful as we thought, we will not spend any more time on the feature and we can focus our efforts somewhere else that will provide customer benefit.

Rivet now puts out a feature and benefit table as part of the release notes. This is because every feature we develop must have customer benefit – or why do it?

Help us continue to develop and enhance the correct set of features. Please email me any comments or suggestions you may have at kevin.berens@rivetsoftware.com.