The Calcbench Insider: August 2016
At
Calcbench, we want to keep you informed about what we offer and what’s new in financial reporting. Whether you're new our products or looking to learn more about how we can improve your day-to-day, we hope you find the information below useful.
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All the best,
The Calcbench Team
Our Products: The Empire Continues to Expand
How have we been spending our summer here at Calcbench? Funny you should ask. Over the last several months we’ve introduced some new tools. Take a look:
- In our Disclosure Viewer, we’ve added Management Discussion & Analysis, Business Description, and Risk Factors as searchable fields. Here you can find data about a company in the company’s own words, with all the usual search precision Calcbench brings. Read more on our blog.
- You can also now search SEC comment letters—the correspondence between SEC and corporate filers, when the SEC has questions about a company’s financial reporting. See more about how to search SEC comment letters.
- And our databases of proxy statements and earnings releases provide valuable intelligence about non-GAAP financial metrics companies might disclose.
All these efforts are meant to complement our core databases of financial data—to provide more context around the numbers companies report, so you can understand their implications fully. Calcbench has you covered.
We also have good news for users of our Excel Add-in: We have added a
tool tip called IntelliSense that shows you the syntax of how to complete a formula. It’s a small but powerful helper.
Read more on how to use it.
Geeking Out on Data
Deferred revenues: steady patterns year after year. During one recent expedition into the Calcbench databases we took a look at patterns of
deferred revenue, and how steady those numbers have been as a portion of corporate revenue overall.
Read more inside to see how much corporate cash streams depend on deferred revenue (and which may feel some stress in future years, as the new revenue recognition accounting standard starts to bite).
Trends in free cash flow. The latest stop on our tour of non-GAAP accounting metrics is a disclosure virtually every large company makes that doesn’t actually exist in Generally Accepted Accounting Principles: free cash flow. We looked at “FCF” reported by the S&P 500 over the last 10 quarters; while the calculations behind each company’s number can vary, the broad direction of free cash flow is upward.
We have more on our blog.
Microsoft uses non-GAAP, waiting until GAAP catches up. We saw an interesting piece of disclosure from Microsoft in its second-quarter earnings release: the company is adopting a temporary non-GAAP metric to report revenue from its sales of its new Windows 10 operating system. Apparently Windows 10 falls into a grey area where pending changes to Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (that is, the new revenue standard arriving in 2018) will catch up to how Microsoft believes Windows 10 revenue
should be recognized.
Read more inside.
News About XBRL
First Inline XBRL filing is submitted. The prize goes to Lennar Corp., which filed its latest quarterly report on July 1 using Inline XBRL—a next-generation technology intended to make XBRL-tagged filings easier to prepare. The SEC gave companies permission in June to start filing financial reports using Inline XBRL. So what do the instance documents in such a filing actually look like?
Read our analysis inside.
Q&A on the XBRL Data Quality Committee. One of the more important, but seldom seen, bodies in the financial reporting world is the
XBRL Data Quality Committee: a group supported by XBRL US to promote “validation rules” that help reduce the rate of errors in XBRL filings. We recently chatted with Susan Yount, director of reporting practices at Workiva and a member of the committee, to hear more about its work so far and what’s coming next for XBRL-tagged filings.
Read more.
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