The SEC made a few changes to their EDGAR Renderer (XBRL Viewer) and quietly released version 3.3 in the beginning of November. Most of the changes are improvements and address issues that were introduced with the previous release of the software.

Schedule 13D and Schedule 13G are similar forms that are used to report a party’s ownership of stock that is over 5% of a class of equity in a company. Because ownership of over 5% in a public company is significant ownership, you must declare it to the public. When you should file each of these schedules depends on additional criteria.

The Novaworks support team frequently receives queries about images missing from SEC test filings or text being incorrectly positioned in areas such as prospectus cover pages when a submission is sent with the “return copy” option enabled, so we've provided a quick lesson on what the return copy is and how to use it.

Sending a correspondence to the SEC via EDGAR can raise questions about how to prepare the filing and how it should be filed. Unlike other information sent to EDGAR, a correspondence can be included as either an exhibit to a filing or it can be transmitted as a separate filing altogether using Form CORRESP.

The SEC announced that along with EDGAR 15.3, they would also be rolling out some SSL changes. The SEC will remove support for SSLv3 from their server, requiring all EDGAR filers to use the TLSv1.0 protocol. For the average filer, “SSL” and “TLS” may be completely foreign terms. You might be wondering: “What is SSL?” and “Does this affect my EDGAR filings?”. To know what the SSL changes mean at the SEC for your company, you’ll first have to take a short trip into the land of Internet security.

With the second quarter Q season in full swing, many filers are noticing for the first time that the SEC has changed their XBRL viewer. Because the SEC released a new version of the viewer between major filing deadlines, the update happened without a lot of notice. In this article, we will cover the changes the SEC made to their viewer and discuss both the improvements that were made as well as some new problems filers might be encountering.

A new form for money market funds that was finalized by the SEC in Release 33-9616 (Money Market Fund Reform; Amendments to Form PF) recently became effective for filing to EDGAR. This form, Form N-CR, has raised questions from preparers and registrants alike who want to know more about the form, when it should be filed, and how to file it.

One of the more challenging aspects of preparing XBRL reports for the SEC is the uncertainty that comes with how that report will view when stakeholders, clients or investors open that data in the SEC’s Interactive Data Viewer. It can be discouraging to put the final touches on a 10-Q or 10-K only to find that something doesn’t look quite right when you send it to the SEC’s previewer or - even worse - to the EDGAR System. What looked completely fine in your editor suddenly doesn’t look anything like the report you were editing.