So you want to outsource the XBRL tagging service? You are not alone.
The US SEC announced April 13, 2009 as the effective date for the 500 largest public U.S. companies to begin filing their financial results using XBRL—an XML-defined standard used to analyze, exchange and report information by using tagged data elements. The ruling by the SEC demonstrates the growing global momentum for all companies to adopt XBRL for disclosing financial reports. At Rivet we have consulted with a large number of public companies and helped some of them by providing either tagging software and/or tagging services.
Some of the public companies in the first wave have elected to outsource the entire XBRL tagging service to service providers. From these companies we have heard over and over again that they believe the XBRL tagging process can be complex and intricate: the labels of the element tags must match the labels in the facing financials, various validation rules have been imposed by the SEC, and the taxonomies can often be complicated confusing. It requires someone to make “judgment calls” in the tagging process.