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.

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.

Section 4 of the report discusses ‘Key Lines, Bottom Lines and Recycling’ and this is where it becomes clear that XBRL could help (p27):

What criteria should be used to specify key line(s)?

4.11 As already noted, users and preparers want key lines to convey and receive ‘headline’ messages and to provide a starting point for analysis. Users will obviously want for this purpose a number (or numbers) that are useful.  That means they need to be relevant (we will discuss this in the next chapter), but what other attributes should these key lines possess?  The authors suggest:

(a) A key line should be understandable, which means it must be underpinned by a principle that explains the significance and the characteristic that this line has compared to other items.  Various principles that might be used are discussed in Chapter 5.

(b) Key lines should to some extent be standardised, to increase transparency and comparability.  Of course, standardisation can be taken too far; uniformity does not result in comparability, and there is very little comparability between entities in different industries any way.  Nevertheless, a degree of standardisation helps users.

The report goes on to discuss various ways that income and expense items may be ‘disaggregated’ for use as performance-indicating key lines and concludes:

Therefore, rather than focusing on issues like the nature of performance, the

number of performance statements, and recycling, Europe needs to thoroughly

engage in the most important performance reporting debate of all—which is about disaggregation.

So is ‘disaggregation’ really “the most important performance reporting debate of all“?