Monday, May 1, 2017

We love hearing from subscribers telling us how they use Calcbench. We received one email the other day that offered a detailed glimpse into just how you can use Calcbench data to improve your financial reporting processes, so we wanted to pass it along.

Obviously we won’t identify the company in question. Suffice to say this filer was trying to implement ASU 2016-18, “Restricted Cash”—an update to accounting standards about how a company should report its Statement of Cash Flows. The new language requires companies to report any restricted cash or cash equivalents in the cash balances they report on the Statement.

One tricky part: the ASU doesn’t define what “restricted cash” or “restricted cash equivalents” actually are—which means those filers trying to implement the standard will want to see how other folks are doing it.

Enter Calcbench, and our database analytics superpowers. Our anonymous subscriber picks up the story from here…

We needed to see how other companies (who also early adopted) presented restricted cash.

I brought my reporting team in my office, logged into Calcbench—and within five minutes, we found filers, the tags used, and how they presented it in their financials. Armed with the examples, our controller bought into our recommendation, and our auditors quickly followed suit.

In the past, they would have spent a few hours hunting and pecking trying to find examples. Using your tool got us past this sticking point, enabling us to hit our filing deadline.

You know I am already on your bandwagon, but I wanted to share another real-life example where your tool crushed it.

The crucial part of this tale is that without Calcbench, this subscriber’s auditors would have spent several hours picking over data points manually—auditors each billing out at several hundred dollars per hour, for several hours. That’s several thousand dollars of expense, for one item. Calcbench cut the time down to a few minutes, and our subscriber more than paid for the cost of his Calcbench subscription right there.

So thank you, Calcbench subscriber. We only exist to help our customers improve their financial reporting processes or their financial analysis skills, and appreciate you sharing the story.

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