Hi Mark, most companies use Microsoft Office software to bring together the key figures (from a financial or consolidation system) and enter the narrative manually. For approvals, those are often tracked in e-mail systems (such as Microsoft Outlook) making it difficult to keep track.

With Disclosure Management, we also leverage Microsoft Office as a tool, but we deliver an add-in which allows financial team members to access the functionality of Disclosure Management from within Word/PowerPoint/Excel in order to maintain only one version of the truth, as well as an audit trail.

Hi Mark, yes, I have seen companies use Disclosure Management for management reports - it is ideal for executive board packages where it is necessary to bring together financial key figures, narrative, as well as graphics. This is a use case that is actually getting more and more interest from our customers.

Hi Birgit - thanks for reply - do you have any measures for the benefits the solution can provide a global organisation?

Hi Gary, actually all three stages are almost equally challenging.

For the inputs, most companies have more than one source of data (such as different consolidation systems or general ledgers), plus the narrative information. Disclosure Management allows you to gather all of the information in one place, so that it can be used in all relevant financial reports and statements.

For the processing, the benefit of Disclosure Management is to ensure only one version of the truth - team members can check out only their sections, which ensures that others cannot make conflicting edits. And we also enable an audit trail of all changes to each version, as well as for the approval process. The workflow enables the collaboration and notification of team members when changes have been made.

For the output, the benefit is that once the information has been consolidated and validated, it can be used for multiple reports, so that it is not necessary to re-validate for each output format (PDF, MS Office, XBRL, HTML).

Thank you to all who have posted a question for Birgit. Just a quick reminder to refresh your browser to see the latest posts.