At Toppan Merrill, we are committed to continuously finding new and efficient ways within our EDGAR and iXBRL filing platform, Toppan Merrill Bridge™, to support SEC and global regulatory filings that streamlines the process of drafting, editing, aligning and tagging corporate compliance documents. In return, giving external reporting professionals total precision from initial XBRL mapping and tagging, to roll-forward, to filing.
This all would not happen without our dedicated Bridge users. One of the best parts of hosting our annual Horizons: Bridge User Event held every September, is the opportunity to get direct user feedback. Of course, it’s great to hear what our users like. But it’s even more valuable to hear what they wish Bridge could do and their ideas for how Bridge could get even better and help them with their biggest pain points.
Because you’ve likely had this experience with B2B SaaS tools: A company touts its innovative features — but when you dig in, you think, “That’s cool, but it doesn’t really help me; it doesn’t address my biggest pain points.”
To avoid that, we have made user feedback to be the driving force behind the Bridge product roadmap on an ongoing basis. We invest our time and energy into developing new features and functionality that make Bridge immediately and meaningfully more useful to you, our users. It all connects back to one of Toppan Merrill’s guiding principles: innovating with purpose.
Bridge: 2024 Summer Showcase
On that note, Horizons 2023 was a fantastic event and we heard tons of rich feedback from users. We’ve been hard at work for the past several months turning that feedback as well as feedback from continual 1:1 client meetings into useful new features. And I’m excited to share a few of those new features here today, which were highlighted in our Bridge: 2024 Summer Showcase:
1. Faster, smarter Excel® linking
Not surprisingly, Excel® linking was top of mind for many people at Horizons last year (as it is every year). Excel is an accountant’s digital workbench, and Bridge users create a high volume of often quite complex connections between Excel and the Word document for their SEC filings within Bridge.
Bridge has always offered industry-leading integrated functionalities, but we’ve added new functionality that makes Excel linking significantly more efficient, including:
- New option to open an existing connection to Excel. This makes the entire process of managing data linking more intuitive and user-friendly — even with two folios open.
- Ability to use new “Show Me” options. This makes it easy to see what data is linked to where.
- New “Apply to Selection” option to insert single links. This speeds link insertion saving valuable time.
- Removal of the Table Link and Single Link nodes and the addition of icons. This makes the Excel linking interface more intuitive and user-friendly.
- New “Collapse/Expand All Links” option. This is particularly useful when dealing with extensive documents, allowing users to collapse or expand all links in one go, making navigation easier and more efficient.
- New “Search Links” option. Provides an easy way to locate specific links within a large, complex document.
Together, these new capabilities further simplify the process of incorporating various data sources into your regulatory and financial reports. This not only delivers significant time savings, but minimizing the risk of errors, resulting in more reliable and accurate reports.
2. Building a multi-part document in sequence
Many of our Bridge users are working within complex ecosystems of global enterprises — not only pulling in multiple data sources that require Excel linking but pulling in entire sections from different documents. We received direct feedback that Bridge users desired functionality to quickly and easily stitch together parts of a document from different sources.
We created a new feature specifically for building multi-part documents in sequence. This new feature enables users to create a single filing document that seamlessly blends Word content parts with highly stylized PDF content, so they can easily create comprehensive and professionally styled reports.
This new capability is particularly beneficial for 20-F Foreign Filers and Proxy clients.
3. Self-service filing capabilities
Bridge users typically lean on Toppan Merrill’s expertise and service in the finer details of the process of submitting their SEC filings. But we’ve gradually heard more and more customers letting us know that they’d like to take a more active role in the filing process.
So, we added several intuitive features aimed at giving users self-service tools to support the filing process. The option to approve for live filing — and schedule a filing — notably reduces manual steps. The ability to approve or unapprove all XBRL tags improves efficiency, especially in the final review. And within the Versions App, Bridge now has new proof types so users can easily review changes between current and previous versions. Those proof types include;
- Compare PDF Full
- Change Pages Only (CPO) Proof
- Word Partial Proof
Our aim here is to empower users to take as much of a self-service filing approach as they’re comfortable with — while continuing to have the expert service at Toppan Merrill ready to support that filing process when and how it’s needed.
Bridge for Proxy Statements
We’ve made sure to bring many of these same new features and enhanced capabilities into the Bridge functionality to enhance our customers ability to produce their proxy statements.
Incremental improvements result in significant gains: Little things make a big difference for Bridge users
The overarching goal of the Bridge Product team is to continuously advance the standard of excellence for financial reporting for our customers and redefine what smart simplicity looks like for our users.
To that end, we’ve recognized one way that so many tech vendors fall short in their promises of customer-led product development: It’s not just about big ideas and transformational features. It’s often the little things that can make an immediate and dramatic difference in the day-to-day work of our users.
Finding these incremental improvements requires a deeper level of listening and engagement with our users. We work to understand how you use Bridge, understand where you feel friction and frustration, and find smarter ways to eliminate that friction and drive efficiency.
Moreover, our commitment to Innovation with a Purpose means we’re ready and willing to invest our development resources to build new features that, from a distance, look like small, marginal gains — but, up close, make all the difference for our users.
Join us at Horizons 2024: See the latest Bridge innovations and share your feedback!
The Bridge Product team is already hard at work building more new features we know you’ll love. But we want to hear your feedback: your ideas for new features, thoughts on how to improve existing functionalities, and other frustrations you encounter that we might be able to help with.
Be sure to attend Horizons 2024 this Fall. You’ll get an inside look at the newest features we’re working on. You’ll hear from peers on how they’re using Bridge to accelerate their efficiency. And, of course, you’ll have the opportunity to share your feedback directly with the Bridge Product team. Watch your inbox later this summer for an invite and we look forward to seeing you in September!
How Toppan Merrill can help:
For 55+ years, the dedicated SEC reporting experts at Toppan Merrill have supported issuers navigating the regulatory disclosure and filing process. Connect with one of our experts at [email protected] or by calling 800.688.4400.
