• Create accurate reports with little to no manual intervention
• Update data throughout all documents automatically
• Create one source for all external financial reporting needs and
• Have confidence that the Cardtronics team would be empowered with the training needed to ensure a successful filing.

After evaluating a number of solutions, Cardtronics chose Rivet’s Crossfire Controller. The results include a successful first XBRL filing submitted on the same day as their press release and 10-Q, just one month after implementing Crossfire Controller. Learn firsthand about Cardtronics’ experience:

• Implementing a self-service XBRL preparation model
• Training their internal team on how to use Crossfire Controller, XBRL tagging, and best practices
• Integrating Crossfire Controller into their existing systems and processes

This webinar will consist of a 20 minute presentation followed by 10 minutes of live Q&A.

Presented by:

Special Guest Mitzie Pierce
Director of External Reporting, Cardtronics

Christy Rohrs, CPA
Director of Education Services, Rivet Software

Thursday, December 15, 1:00pm-1:30pm ET – Register for webinar »

Join us for a 45-minute product demo and get a taste of how Crossfire Controller empowers companies to:

• Accelerate the financial close process and reporting cycles
• Minimize manual collection of data from disjointed sources
• Put an end to maintaining multiple data sources and rekeying data at every step
• Take control of the review process with advanced multi-user collaboration, change tracking, and version control
• Bring XBRL in-house with confidence, when the time is right

…all without giving up the comfort of working within the Microsoft Office environment.

These webinars will consist of a 30 minute product overview including live, interactive product demonstration, followed 15 minutes of open Q&A.

Thursday, December 1, 12:30pm-1:15pm ET – Register for webinar »
Tuesday, December 13, 2:00pm-2:45pm ET – Register for webinar »
Thursday, January 12, 1:00pm-1:45pm ET – Register for webinar »

You may have heard the slogan, “Technology when you want it,” from Esurance recently.  As a former employee of Esurance (I worked for Esurance as the Director of Business Intelligence between 2000 and 2003), I have to say that I quite like the rebranding that happened in 2010 to replace the pink-haired female spy named Erin! I never truly understood what a spy had to do with auto insurance.

So how does auto insurance connect to Rivet Software you ask? Auto insurance buyers and policyholders like to have options. Similarly, options are very important to public companies that need to comply with the SEC XBRL mandate.

First and foremost, Rivet is a software company. Our mission is to create the best SaaS-based software to support the full lifecycle of XBRL – from data creation, presentation, assurance to consumption by regulators, analysts and the mass market. However, we also understand that technology alone sometimes can’t fully handle complex challenges. This is the main reason why we have compliance services & professional services departments that can provide assistance to companies that need “people” to help them navigate the complex processes of XBRL compliance and be more efficient with the financial disclosure processes.

Technology when you want it

We have customers that are completely comfortable using our financial reporting software Crossfire to complete their XBRL filings. Our software is designed for accountants, so the complexities of XBRL are hidden and don’t require customers to learn all the ins and outs of XBRL. Our matured technology platform has proven to be user-friendly and efficient to handle block and detailed tagging and improve the last-mile close process.

T. Rowe Price has been our customer since the SEC XBRL Voluntary Filing Program (VFP), and has gained tremendous knowledge of XBRL in the last few years. Candace Knott (working in the CFO group at T. Rowe Price) has told us,

“We are a risk-aware organization, so outsourcing our XBRL reporting was not an option for us,” said Knott. “Even as we worked on our voluntary filings, we began to plan and prepare for the detailed note tagging requirements.” T. Rowe Price could have outsourced the XBRL reporting function but instead they used their XBRL filing as an opportunity to learn more about standards-based financial information management. Technology is an enabler for them to take the project in-house. The filing agent handling T. Rowe’s filings commented on the last detailed tagged XBRL filing submitted by the T. Rowe team as one of the best DFN filings they have seen. I know Candace was thrilled to hear that! Job well done indeed.

Some of our customers came to us because of the mandate, and discovered there is so much more our software can do for them beyond  XBRL compliance. This is from Joe Wakham, the Financial Reporting Manager of NHI (National Health Investors):

“I’ve used Crossfire to develop spreadsheets to support my reporting. It’s allowed me to produce more detailed reports than ever before because I don’t have to worry about dealing with each number manually. The reports are both more detailed and more flexible. The GL integration has allowed me to get to my data quicker- for my reporting and to answer questions quickly and easily. Take for example my quarterly revenue report. The information in this report is easily manipulated- I can get different looks and views of the data to get valuable information and insight. Using Crossfire means that I don’t spend my time digging for numbers- I develop the reports and start answering those tough questions.” Since Crossfire is an integrated platform for both internal and external reporting, Joe is able to accomplish what he needs (XBRL compliance) and what he wants (answering tough business questions). For Joe, the technology is what enables him to take total control over the financial disclosure process.

People when you don’t

We also have many customers who have chosen the full-service solution we provide. We do all the actual tagging work and customers are engaged for reviewing at every stage of the process. They have outsourced compliance, but they don’t outsource responsibility.

XBRL is still new to many filing companies. Having dedicated, knowledgeable and experienced people that can help when filing deadline approaches is definitely a plus for most companies.

In my opinion, it’s quite logical that most companies have chosen full-service initially. It’s new, companies are short on resources as is, and no matter how you look at it, technology could be intimating.

When the SEC mandated that all public companies prepare and submit their financial filings in XBRL format, Quicksilver knew its lean accounting team did not have the capacity or expertise to take on this additional burden. It clearly needed help. They need to meet the SEC’s XBRL requirements without interruption to its daily business operations.

“We have a small staff,” said Brian Dutton, Assistant Controller for Quicksilver. “There was no one in-house that had the bandwidth to take on the additional responsibility of tagging our financial data and preparing XBRL reports each quarter.” Ideally, Quicksilver wanted to establish a long-term partnership with a company experienced in XBRL that could be trusted with its financial data and to handle the entire filing process quickly and efficiently.

The companies that successfully utilize Rivet resources treat Rivet as an extension to their own team. The whole team works on defining milestones, selecting best elements, reviewing changes. Teamwork is the key to guarantee on-time and high-quality filings.

Options are good

For companies like Quicksilver, they always have the option to take the reporting process in-house when they are ready and want to take it in-house. Since Crossfire is the exact same software that’s used by Rivet’s self-service clients and full-service clients, Quicksilver will gain familiarity with the software when they review the filings online. And since all the work done by the Rivet Services Team stays in the data repository, Quicksilver will not lose any of the work that’s done by the Rivet Team.

So, I do think Esurance got the slogan perfectly right this time. The slogan showed how Esurance understood the connection between product/service offerings and what the customers want and need.

This upgrade coincides with the SEC’s new interactive data filing mandate for mutual fund companies, which took effect on January 1, 2011. Dragon View is based on the same Rivet-developed technology used to power the Interactive Data Viewer on the SEC’s website, which allows filers to see what their XBRL documents will look like before they are filed.

Among the larger user groups for Dragon View are:

• CEOs and CFOs: to review and benchmark a company’s financial information against other SEC filers.
• Controllers and SEC Reporting Professionals: to validate the use of XBRL tags across industries and peer groups – users know what percentage of other SEC filers chose an element to tag certain data.
• Auditors: to easily review and analyze a client’s XBRL SEC filings.
• Financial Information Aggregators: to collect, view and export XBRL filings to Excel for distribution and analysis.

Rivet releases updates to Dragon View on an ongoing basis. It has been tested and approved by mutual fund advisors, internal and external filing preparers and global business executives. This desktop application can be purchased and downloaded instantly by following this link.

I’ve engaged in many conversations with wide-eyed, tech-savvy people who salivate when I explain what we’re doing with software at Rivet.  It takes a significant amount of effort to make complex technology easy to use.  But just try telling this story to the average guy or gal on the street, and you’ll mostly get blank stares and polite nods.

Here’s my best attempt at explaining fast-tracked product development and deployment at Rivet:

It’s like changing tires on a moving vehicle that’s racing down a highway at 80mph.

Former Microsoft employees like myself who’ve worked on billion dollar assets such as MS Office, SQL Server and Dynamics ERPs, know the importance of developing a product that scales both in number of users and data volumes.  We also know that leveraging existing technology like MS Excel allows us to expedite our development process to focus on critical and core customer scenarios.

Using the “agile” product development methodology, we can respond to changes in the market, as well as statutory pronouncements that impact the industry and ultimately our customers.  We can move quickly on these changes and deploy them to our Servers (SaaS model) which are then instantly consumed by our clients.

Rivet is first and foremost a software company, so the only way to stay ahead of the game is to be a player in defining it.  So far, so good!

Crossfire 3.0 also offers greater tag matching intelligence that makes it easier to add new content and make changes that are automatically updated throughout the document.  In addition, multiple users can now collaborate on a filing with greater ease.  XBRL templates can now be split between parties responsible for different portions of the document, and then merged back into a single master.

Current Crossfire users should attend a webinar this week to learn more about the new Online Reviewer’s Guide.  If you aren’t currently using Crossfire for your XBRL financial filings, contact an expert at Rivet for more information.

Well here are a few reasons:

1. The number of filings have gone up

As the S.E.C. mandate kicks in, more companies are required to file so the ‘pie’ has got bigger. Obviously this should have a positive impact on all software companies providing XBRL filing services.

2. The filing requirements are getting more complex and the scope is widening

As new filing criteria are added, like detail footnote tagging, not all XBRL reporting software may be able to support the new requirements or support them well. Rivet works closely with the S.E.C to ensure that our software keeps up with new and changing filing demands. We are also agile enough to able to respond quickly and effectively as the filing scope expands e.g. to embrace mutual funds.

3. We’ve been doing this for a while

Rivet’s founders and management team have been in the corporate reporting software business since the early 1990′s and Rivet was in the XBRL reporting business some years before the S.E.C. mandate came into force. Some of us have been engaged with XBRL since early 1999, which is not long after Charlie Hoffman first had the idea and when it was known as XML-based Financial Reporting Markup Language or XFRML. So we’ve been around the block and know a thing or two about corporate reporting and the long-term potential of XBRL.

4. We’re not just about technology and tagging

Producing an accurate XBRL S.E.C. filing is not just about technology and tagging. To figure out whether to extend the US-GAAP taxonomy or not or what is the best tag to use for a specific reporting line requires both tagging smarts and accounting knowledge. That’s why our tag teams have access to our on-staff-CPAs so that our technology skills are complemented by our accounting skills.

5. We see the bigger picture

XBRL is about much more than tagging and compliance, it’s about a better way to control and communicate information. Rivet’s Crossfire Reporting Platform is fully-XBRL enabled and can make use of any XBRL taxonomy used anywhere around the world so it’s ideal for use in multinational corporations. But Crossfire is equally capable of producing all kinds of internal corporate reporting formats – including the ‘new’ integrated reports that combine financial and non-financial information in the same reporting context.

We’re looking forward to an even better year in 2011.

As the blog post points out, a 2007 Journal of Accountancy article highlights an early adopter of XBRL reporting – United Technologies Corporation (UTC) – who clearly explain their current and anticipated quarterly 10-Q reporting process. The first point to reiterate is that producing a 10-Q has never been a push button process. Data is aggregated from a number of sources and must be collaboratively validated before being compiled into a report filing that combines both financial and non-financial data and is re-formatted for online submission.

The data sources are ERP systems and a range of other organizational systems.  In large organizations, financial data is typically ‘staged’ within a consolidation reporting system and non-financial data staged within something else (e.g. a Word document in UTC’s case). Then all this data is combined together, and formatted  and converted for submission to EDGAR.

Provisioning staging applications like consolidation systems generally depends on a pre-processing step called ETL – extract, transform and load. In the XBRL world, even if data was already tagged down in some ERP general ledgers using XBRL-GL, there’s still no way that all incoming data would be tagged. So tagging either becomes part of the ‘transform’ (i.e. pre-load) step of ETL or the acronym expanded to ‘ELTT’ to accommodate post-load tagging of untagged incoming data in the reporting application itself.

Now if you can cut a step out of this process by removing the need to stage data in both a consolidation reporting application and a Word document then this single-step submission staging should save time and effort and reduce the potential for error. But given that a new process requirement is introduced, XBRL tagging, some of that time will be clawed back by demands of the ‘enhanced’ process. Even so UTC estimated 145 hours of saved time or c.17%.

In this situation, the focal point for process savings becomes this single submission staging area – the reporting application that both gathers data from disparate feeder systems and prepares it for submission as a 10-Q. If this application is not fit-for-purpose then clearly any process savings will be eroded. That’s why it’s important that the reporting tool has been designed for the XBRL world. A world in which incoming data may already be XBRL-tagged, post-load tagging of non-XBRL data is efficiently managed and report output options are designed to make filing 10-Q submissions and complying with all aspects of the S.E.C. mandate as easy as possible. In other words what Rivet’s Crossfire was designed for. You can find out more here.