The results of a recent survey by the Financial Executives Research Foundation (FERF) provide some interesting findings on the practices employed by a cross-section of SEC registrants in preparing and filing their quarterly and annual financial reports.
The FERF survey, which includes responses from 416 companies and is titled SEC Reporting Practices and the Impact of XBRL: 2012 Survey, covers a number of areas relating to SEC reporting processes, including the size of SEC reporting teams; the number of working days it takes companies at quarter and year end to close the books, to release earnings, and to file documents with the SEC; bottlenecks encountered in the reporting process; how long it takes to prepare and review XBRL reports and the level of outsourcing of these functions; the length of “pencils-down” periods XBRL providers require to produce a final version of the XBRL-tagged financial statements; and customer satisfaction ratings for various providers of XBRL solutions.
