Dragon View, Still the most popular XBRL viewer, Just Better!

March 23rd, 2009 by Emily Huang - Co‑founder & SVP, Sales & Marketing

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.

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Hasta La Vista, Open Source

March 6th, 2009 by Mike Rohan - Chairman & Co-founder

Why does business software have to be so boring? With all the changes in technology, including the internet, email, and RSS feeds—not to mention major breakthroughs in operating systems, browsers, and communications—has anything really changed for accounting and finance users? The last (and maybe the only) big breakthrough was in 1979 when Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston developed VisiCalc and made Apple and Microsoft stockholders (but unfortunately, not Dan and Bob) wealthy. To this day the only standard in the financial reporting and analysis world is still the spreadsheet invented by Dan and Bob; this simple solution (whether Microsoft Excel, IBM’s Lotus, or Google spreadsheet) may well be the only software that is used by every accounting and financial professional users in the world; why? Since it is virtually the only application they have complete control over, they can depend on and trust their spreadsheets.

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The impact of Agile development and what it means to the customer PT 1

February 26th, 2009 by Kevin Berens - CPO

How feedback from customers get into the product – the evolution of CrossTag for XBRL tagging

What is Agile development (using a Wikipedia reference):

Agile software development is a group of software development methodologies that are based on similar principles. Agile methodologies generally promote a project management process that encourages frequent-

Stop – Stop – Stop

As a customer, you could care less how Rivet Software develops software.

What you do care about (in addition to quality), is how exactly does a product feature get into the product? If you suggest a usability idea or a product enhancement, you want to know when you might expect this feature to get incorporated into the product (assuming that the idea will benefit all customers). If you hope to see this feature be incorporated into the product within 3 to 12 months, then you really do care that Rivet uses agile development.

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