Edgar Online, Business Wire Ally on XBRL Filings

Company filings and financial data vendor Edgar Online is providing press release and regulatory disclosures distribution provider Business Wire with access to the Xcelerate processing tool Edgar Online developed internally to convert documents and apply XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) tagging, which enables direct comparison between data in filings and financial reports.

Since the US Securities and Exchange Commission mandated that financial filings be submitted in XBRL, companies have been looking to outsource the document conversion, says David Frankel, chief marketing officer at Edgar Online. "There's an opportunity in the marketplace to combine both outsourced consulting services for XBRL tagging and the technology to deliver an XBRL on-boarding tool, or what we call ‘assisted self-service'," which includes document tagging and additional consulting if needed, Frankel says.

Since the SEC's voluntary XBRL filing program began in 2005, Business Wire had used an XBRL conversion tool from another provider to support its filing service, but switched to Xcelerate for its balance of technical sophistication and usability after reassessing the available technology options in the market, says Michael Becker, senior vice president of financial product strategy at Business Wire.

By licensing Edgar Online's technology, Business Wire maintains full control of the filing process for clients, with its team of accountants assessing a company's 10-K and 10-Q documents against US GAAP taxonomy, mapping and tagging the documents using Xcelerate, and then consulting with clients until the mapping is satisfactory, before filing the documents with the SEC, Becker says.

The consulting services could also include advising on what tags are most consistent within an industry, so the data becomes more comparable for institutional investors analyzing a group of companies. For example, revenue figures may be listed as revenues, gross revenues or revenues from operations, which cannot be compared directly, but Business Wire's offering will recommend what tags peers within an industry typically apply to certain values, enabling filers to provide more consistently tagged data to investors, Frankel says.