info@rivetsoftware.com | www.rivetsoftware.com | 800-854-8821

5 WAYS TO BECOME AFINANCIAL REPORTING

Financial Reporting

EBOOK

Hero

About the Author >>

About the Author: Rivet SoftwareIntroduction: How to Become a Hero

Tip #1 Dig for Data, Drive for ProfitsTip #2 Keep Your Enemies CloseTip #3 Make Your Financial Story MatterTip #4 Exceptional Data = Exceptional CommunicationTip #5 Improve Your Team Collaboration Quotient

Conclusion: Feeling Like a Financial Reporting Hero?

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How to Become a HERO >>

Rivet Software provides financial reporting systems that improve the way companies create and consume financial data. Rivet’s Interactive Financial Management Solution, Crossfire, is trusted by more than 300 companies today.

Founded in 2003 by software and accounting industry veterans, Rivet’s mission remains to revolutionize global financial communications by enabling financial transparency and leveraging global standards. Headquartered in Denver, CO, the firm employs the most experienced XBRL and financial reporting staff in the industry. Rivet was honored in 2011 and 2012 as an Inc. 500 company.

About the Author

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5 Ways to Become a Hero >>

As a financial reporting professional, you’re tasked with keeping a lot of people happy - your CEO, your board, your shareholders, and your staff. Not to mention yourself. Making the most of your time, your numbers, and your staff is what sets you apart.

The relationships between boards and financial reporting departments have evolved over the past couple of decades with increased general legislation, the 2008 Securities and Exchange Commission XBRL mandate, and increased liability with the SEC.

Strategically improving your organization’s financial health and making your financial data more accurate, more accessible, and more interactive is the most effective way for you to stand out and move up. But how do you present more accurate, accessible, and interactive financial data to all of your stakeholders? If it was easy every CFO would be doing it and every company would be benefitting.

We’ve put together this short guide to help you get more out of your financial data and in turn make you, your CEO, your board, your staff, and your investors happier.

How to become a HERO

If you go to a board meeting and the numbers are slightly off or you can’t

explain something, a little bit of credibility dies. Get them off by a lot and you just won’t be around. What really matters, though, is having the experience and the confidence to

distill down in simple words how you think you can make a business better

or how a company can be made better. Data and analysis really help with that process. If you are able to

present that, it’s an enormously powerful position.

James CheesewrightCFO of Eurostar

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Keep Your Enemies Close >>

Can you drill down into the details of your ERP or CPM data? Or is your team still pulling numbers from various spreadsheets from disparate locations? Financial data needs to be accurate and accessible. Good data provides more opportunity for your company to invest in its next strategic direction. How comfortable are you in the accuracy of your numbers? Are you rekeying or copying and pasting data into multiple documents? If there is only one version of the financial truth, you, your job, and your company will be more transparent and will operate more efficiently – saving money and time.

Improved data integration will allow your team to avoid rekeying important, game-changing numbers or worse yet – inputting incorrect data or actually completely missing data. Data integration is accomplished by directly linking financial data from your original data source to your final SEC Word document, to your Board Books, to your PowerPoint presentations, or to your Investor Relations documents.

Dig for Data, Drive for Profits

Are you presenting the right numbers to your CEO, to your board, and to your investors?

#1

Can you show your board exactly where that number came from?

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Make Your Financial Story Matter >>

Extensive and useful peer comparison capabilities enable your team to analyze and compare your company’s performance with your peers and competitors. This will allow you to add instant value to the decision-making process by providing easy access to competitive data. Your board always wants to know how you stack up to your competitors. What is your current process for quickly and accurately gathering financial data? Your competitors may be using Google or Yahoo Finance, but you’re more savvy than that. Find ways to take more control of who you analyze, the data you analyze, and when you analyze it.

Keep Your Enemies Close#2

National Health Investors, Inc. quickly analyzed competitor data for better business decisions.

Discover How >>

Having the ability to drill down into today’s complicated, and often lengthy, disclosure documents will give you a leg up on your board and your competition. Your board knows that investors are looking for specific financial information from the source.

Standard (and some not-so standard) KPIs You Should Know about Your Competitors: Current Ratios, Return on Assets, Turnover Ratios, Debt to Equity, Dividend Yield.

Today, with XBRL, you can find these answers quickly and accurately. The more companies embrace XBRL peer comparisons, the more analysts will do the same, and from there the average investor will begin demanding the accuracy, speed, and transparency that XBRL data offers.

Quickly find accurate data on your competitors.

Success Story

According to the SEC website, “as more companies embrace interactive data (XBRL), sophisticated analysistools now used by financial professionals could soon become available to the average investor.”

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Exceptional Data =Exceptional Communication >>

Financial Reporting Should Be Interactive, Not Reactive.Make Your Financial Story Matter

Your board and shareholders continue to demand more and more transparency from your financials. It’s your job to tell the most transparent financial story possible. The reality is XBRL is here to stay and it has the ability to make your job easier, not harder. You have the opportunity to look better by making your financial data more interactive. The need for data to be more accurate, more comparable, and more accessible is only going to increase.

We know you’re responsible for the Big Financial Picture of your company - forecasting, strategizing, and implementing better processes that will result in an improved bottom-line. It’s necessary to focus not only the creation of XBRL, but how to better consume that data. By having easy access to higher quality data it will dramatically increase the full impact of your contribution to your company and to your company’s financial success.

Your board should look to you as the XBRL expert. It’s now a must-have on the resumes of all financial reporting executives. Show them you know the good, bad, and the sometimes slightly ugly side of XBRL. Knowledge is power. Don’t just strive to get ahead of the curve, create the curve by learning as much as you can about XBRL and Interactive Financial Reporting.

So, what makes InteractiveData... Interactive?

+ It can be directly pulled from your ERP, BI or CPM

+ It is easily integrated into Microsoft Office

+ It can be efficiently managed within your various regulatory documents

+ It is easily accessible (and transparent) to your CEO, your Investor Relation’s team, your board,& your investors

#3

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Team Collaboration >>

Exceptional Data =Exceptional Communication

#4

Imagine you’re minutes from heading into your Annual Board Meeting when your Controller informs you there are changes to the numbers you’re moments away from presenting. You then scramble to update the numbers, the graphs, the tables, the charts, but how do you know if you updated the right number in the right chart?

What if you could automatically link your Microsoft Excel files directly to your Microsoft PowerPoint presentations allowing you to make last minute changes to charts, graphs and tables without affecting data integrity or formatting? You should have that confidence when presenting your data in your PowerPoint presentations – it’s crucial to your credibility. Can your team create charts, tables and graphs in Excel and update in PowerPoint, Microsoft Word and PDFs from a single data source?

Having superior PowerPoint linking capabilities will also enhance your data’s accuracy and save valuable time when updating crucial Board Book data. In your current process, your numbers within charts, graphs and tables should automatically change and roll forward to the next period. Improving the way data is communicated to your CEO, your board & your investors will lead to better overall financial communication.

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Feeling Like a SuperHero Yet? >>

Improve Your TeamCollaboration Quotient

#5

Your CEO, your board, and your investors want harmonious efficient teams leading your company. They want you to get the most out of your team. In today’s public company, there are many departments working on the financials your team manages – legal, audit, and your entire executive team. Interactive Financial Management means all of these groups can literally be on the same page with access (controlled by you, of course) to view your financial documents simultaneously, which will save time and automatically add efficiencies by having only one version of your company’s truth.

However, to get to that truth collaboratively it’s important to ask the hard questions of your team. Start with these:

1. How efficient is our SEC filing process? 2. How accountable are we to each other & our company? 3. What can we do to become more transparent & improve our financial reporting processes? 4. Do we know who makes a change and when that change was made? 5. How can we work more collaboratively within our financial documents?

Having the ability to have more than one team member working on your SEC document will not only lead to a higher quality document, but the work will get done faster. You’re the CFO, and it’s also imperative to know what changes have been made, when, and by whom from a quality control standpoint. It’s also important for your employees to know they’re valued and are a part of the solution to make an out-of-date process more efficient and more accurate. It’s why they got their accounting degrees in the first place – reward them with an improved process that gives them more opportunities to make your entire organization better.

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Feeling Like A FinancialReporting Superstar Yet?

CEOS are relying more and more on their CFOs to drive change and go beyond numbers as usual. Your influence with you board and your CEO will be driven partially by how interactive your financial data is, how quickly you can get accurate company financial data to these key decision makers and how fast your team can analyze what your competitors are doing. And, don’t forget the SEC, who won’t be leaving you alone anytime soon either.

Getting the right answers is all about asking the right questions.

5 Key Interactive Financial Management Questions to Ask Yourself - Every day.

1. Where exactly is your financial data coming from?2. How is it integrated into your processes?3. Is your team successfully managing your financial disclosures?4. How accurate are your SEC reports?5. How accurate and affective is your competitive data?

Interactive Financial Management is about creating quality data that you can quickly present to your various stakeholders with complete confidence. We work every day with CFOs on how to best answer these ques-tions and what financial reporting solutions work best for their specific situation. No two companies are alike, but we do know all companies want to be better. It’s a fact – happy companies produce better results, which are ultimately what you, your CEO, your board, and your investors want, right?

info@rivetsoftware.com | www.rivetsoftware.com | 800-854-8821

Recap

Interactive Financial Reporting will make your life simpler, not more complicated.

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