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The Calcbench Insider: June  2017

 

Hello Calcbench fans. As we approach summer, Calcbench has been busy improving our product offerings by launching more services and resources to help you get the most from your Calcbench experience. We’ve been geeking out on our troves of data, too.

 

Whether you’re new to our products or looking to learn more about how we can improve your day-to-day, we hope you find the information below useful and entertaining. Sign up here for a free Calcbench trial. As always, your feedback is welcome.

 

All the best,

 

The Calcbench Team


 

What’s New in Calcbench

 

I want my Calcbench TV! Calcbench is pleased to announce that we’re launching a new series of videos about ourselves: what we can provide to the financial reporting community, how to use our (many) databases, and how Calcbench improves the lives of financial analysts, corporate accountants, and academic researchers everywhere. Our first video, giving a brief overview of Calcbench, is here for your viewing pleasure.

 

How to do text searches on Calcbench. Yes, you can indeed search for strings of specific text in Calcbench databases. This post walks through how you can do it, and how to set search parameters so you can find the results most relevant to you. Read more.

 

A metric for accounting reporting complexity? This month we catch up with Udi and Rani Hoitash, accounting professors from Northeastern and Bentley Universities, respectively; about a paper they published studying how a filer’s use of XBRL tags can suggest levels of reporting complexity and higher risks of restatement or material weakness. Read the interview.  (Calcbench is always happy to collaborate with academics to help them achieve their research goals.)


 

Calcbench (Kinda) Live!

 

Our CEO and co-founder, Pranav Ghai, recently spoke at a NYSSA event in New York about the future of financial reporting. If you missed the event in person and want to catch up, watch the video, complete with Ghai and several other thoughtful panelists. Watch now.


 

Geeking Out on Data

 

Employee severance costs, 2014-2017. The money companies spend to send employees out the door has been rising briskly in the last three years—and when you consider the average amount spent, severance costs have been soaring (up 88 percent). How did we figure that out? What does it all mean? How can you do similar precision-strike bits of research yourself? Read more.

 

Gleaning intelligence on Hulu’s finances. Hulu itself is not a publicly traded company, but its four principal investors (21st Century Fox, Comcast, Disney, and Time Warner) all are—so how might we try to find insights about Hulu’s financial health, based on those four investors’ disclosures? This month, we walk through their latest filings to learn what we can.


 

Financial Reporting in the News

 

SEC speaks on new revenue standard. Two senior people from the SEC’s Office of the Chief Accountant, including the chief accountant himself, hit the conference circuit recently speaking about the new standard for revenue recognition, arriving in December. Disclosures about how companies are implementing the standard, and its possible effects, are improving; but still not as fulsome as the SEC would like. Read what they had to say. Also, don’t forget last month’s post about disclosures so far.


 

 

Need to Learn the Ropes?

 

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