Vintage Filings Business Blog

By Benjamin Blascoe

7 Reasons to choose Vintage Filings for your XBRL Conversion

ONE
Vintage Filings has teamed up with Rivet Software for XBRL

Rivet Software, based out of Denver Colorado, is a company pioneering the future of global financial communications. Rivet Software has been the key figure in XBRL since its inception – even being contracted to design the XBRL standard for the Security Exchange Commission (the very same standard the SEC has now mandated).

TWO
Service

Through Vintage Filings exclusive partnership with Rivet Software, you will have the reputation of Vintage Filings’ unsurpassed customer service – 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year – to answer any looming questions, comments or concerns you may have about the process.

THREE
Capability

Combining the unparalleled Rivet Software with Vintage Filings’ abilitiy as the third most-active full-service financial printer gives you exclusive access to the technology that the Fortune 500 and the Security Exchange Commission know and trust.

FOUR
Expertise

We have developed an in-house XBRL team that is dedicated to staying at the forefront of any XBRL developments. So if anything changes with your filing or the SEC standards, you will have plenty of time to re-submit the file and let our expert XBRL team get to work.

FIVE
Technology is easy and fulfills GAAP requirements

Standing for General Accepted Accounting Principals, the GAAP requirements provided by our technology is seamless – to make your conversation easy and efficient. It even works directly with Microsoft Excel, so there is no need to learn new software!

SIX
Free Set-Up

If you sign up now for the tagging of your four-key quarterly documents, Vintage Filings we will set up your extensions at no extra charge.

SEVEN
Price

As always, Vintage Filings is offering extremely competitive pricing. Judging from price sheets we have received from our two major competitors, Vintage Filings XBRL can save you roughly $10,000!

Choose Vintage Filings for your XBRL conversion today!

Honestly, what do you have to lose?

Faster results. Better service. Unbeatable price.

This week, on this business blog, we’re going to be focusing on the importance of online business networking (both in principle along with practical websites that you may or may not have heard of).  Much like Alice at the beginning of the classic children’s book, Internet users have felt stymied for too long: while online choices appear limitless, the path toward enchantment seems oddly blocked.

“MySpace, Facebook, and eBay are all worthy, even revolutionary, advances, but these closed communities are hardly the intuitive platforms the Web has promised for so long,” says Gary K. Kimmons, creator of award-winning learning software technology. “The next iteration of the Internet promises to focus on personalization, on platforms that thoroughly integrate commerce, work, and play, and lead the user to solutions they didn’t know existed.”

Mr. Kimmons is also the CEO of eDOORWAYS, a new business-to-consumer social network website that integrates search technologies to help solve lifestyle problems for consumers and drive traffic to goods and service providers. The platform is unique in that it delivers a real-time collaborative problem-solving venue with capabilities for instantaneously sourcing correct information, products, services, and solutions.

Here’s how it works: say you’re a homeowner living in a 907 area code and your hot water goes out. Rather than reach for the Yellow Pages, or engage in Google searches that yield thousands of geographically worthless results, instead you enter the “SOLVE” doorway with your query. Instantly you are put in contact with local vendors that appear onscreen simultaneously and bid for your business. Or, more industrious users might choose the “LEARN” doorway, which will teach you, step-by-step, how to install the hot water heater yourself, tailoring the process to your particular skill set.

By Benjamin Blascoe

Times of economic turmoil can be very hard on both public and private companies, especially when American consumers are pinching every penny as it were their last. However, despite all the fall-outs, cut-corners, lay-offs, salary caps and pure frugality of businesses in time of need, there is one area that major companies are continuing to allocate funds – Green IT projects.

IT (internal technology) is the department specific to all things technological and consequently, there is a lot of energy and heat emitted from this department’s territory. Many major companies around the world are setting aside a chunk of their budget to transition into a greener realm. According to Businessweek.com, a study by Deloitte claims that large organizations with $500m plus revenue are setting aside AT LEAST five percent of their IT Budget for green IT projects.

And if we want to get down to the nitty-gritty, even though these companies are allocating relatively large chunks of IT’s budget to purchase this stuff, in the end all cost will be curbed by the incredulous amount of saved energy as well as benefits to employee and environmental health

The trend is similar all over the world. The Businessweek.com article goes on to highlight a British company, John Lewis Partnerships. JLP recently switched to the UNIX machine which uses 80 percent less utilization – meaning fewer machines, less hassle, less money.

Even in this economic debacle, it is nice to see that some people are still focusing on the future. What is your business doing?

So how is the business travel industry doing during the recession? The National Business Travel Association (NBTA) and Egencia today released a sample of findings from a study that quantifies global business travel spend and projects business travel growth through 2013. Evaluating 72 countries, the study shows that business travel growth patterns vary dramatically across the globe with North America advancing at an average rate of just over 2 percent per year for the last decade, Western Europe growing 4.6 percent annually and Asia Pacific advancing by 7.2 percent annually over the same period. Emerging Europe and the Middle East/Africa region advanced annually by 12.4 percent and 7.7 percent, respectively, from 1998 to 2008.

Kevin Maguire, CCTE, GLP, NBTA President & CEO, said, “This study is the most comprehensive look at the global business travel industry available today. Corporations can leverage this insight to guide their travel programs and preferred supplier market strategies across the globe for many years to come. We look forward to making the full report available in the coming weeks.”

The study predicts that growth of business travel in China and Japan will exceed U.S. growth over the next five years. In addition, developing nations, like India, Vietnam, Iran and Indonesia will experience significant compound annual growth rates over the same timeframe.

“Developing countries are proving to be fertile business-travel areas,” said Rob Greyber, president of Egencia. “Over the next five years, we’ll see countries like India and China grow at rates of 5.3 and 6.5 percent respectively, versus the U.S. projected growth rate of 0.3 percent.”

Global Business Travel Market & Outlook

The study finds that the North America, Western Europe and Asia Pacific regions each represent about 30 percent of the global business travel market (90 percent combined), estimated to total $929 billion in 2008. This figure includes both domestic and outbound international travel. The remaining 10 percent of global activity takes place in Latin America, Emerging Europe and the Middle East and Africa. The United States represents the largest piece of global business travel spend with $261 billion or 28 percent of the world total, followed by China at 10 percent and Japan at 8 percent.

“This study shows that business travel spend has increased by more than 35 percent since 1998, making it an impactful industry in the global economy,” said Kenneth McGill, NBTA Research Consultant and lead analyst on the IHS Global Insight report. “Most of this growth has been due to an expanding global economy and the rising dispersion of business travel activity around the world.”

Despite the United States’ position as the global leader in business travel spend, Asia Pacific is poised for substantial growth over the next five years, while U.S. growth is expected to stagnate. China’s spend, at $93.8 billion in 2008, has tripled over the past 10 years and is expected to lead market growth between 2008 and 2013, followed by Japan and South Korea. Measured in terms of the dollar increase in business travel spending, the United States is expected to be fourth in terms of growth, just behind India.

Business Travel by Industry Sector

The study examines the highest growth industries for business travel globally, of which the top five include utilities, food processing and services, real estate, social and personal services, and professional and business services. Over the next five years, sectors that directly benefit from both infrastructure development (utilities, government and communications) and economic stimulus packages (education, construction and real estate) will experience the most significant growth in business travel spend.

The research shows that, globally, businesses spend an average of about 1.1 cents of every sales dollar on business travel, though it varies widely by industry. In the equipment and leasing sector, for example, the measure of travel intensity is more than three times higher at 3.7 cents per dollar, while in the mining sector, business travel measures only fractions of a cent per dollar of revenue.

Reflecting the global recession, nearly every industry foresees a decline in business travel outlays in 2009 from 2008 levels, led by steep drops in the transportation services, paper and paper products, construction, chemicals, communication equipment, and rubber and plastic manufacturing sectors. The only anticipated uptick in spending is expected in education with a 2.2 percent projected rise. However, there has been a downward trend in the amount of travel spending businesses require to support their sale and operational activities, which is a clear indication of the rising productivity of business travel.

“The increase in productivity highlights several major shifts within our industry,” said Greyber. “Stronger travel management and greater efficiency when traveling have both contributed to this change, essentially driving down business travel spend per revenue dollar. This development should be a key consideration in program planning, in addition to overall macroeconomic changes and sector trends.”

16% of high-impact, high-tech firms have at least one immigrant founder, according to a study released today by the Office of Advocacy of the U.S. Small Business Administration. Although these firms are concentrated in states with large immigrant populations, in most other respects they resemble high-impact, high-tech firms founded by native-born entrepreneurs.

Moreover, these immigrant entrepreneurs are highly educated and appear to be strongly rooted in the United States. Roughly 55 percent of the foreign-born founders hold a masters degree or a doctorate. In addition, they are more than twice as likely as native-born founders to hold a doctorate. Furthermore, 77 percent of the foreign-born high-tech entrepreneurs are American citizens and, on average, they have lived over 25 years in the United States. Two-thirds of them received their college degrees here, as well.

“Immigrant entrepreneurs clearly contribute a significant amount to our country’s cutting edge high-tech firms,” said Shawne McGibbon, acting Chief Counsel for Advocacy. “This report outlines these contributions and delivers important new data about immigrant entrepreneurs.”

High-tech Immigrant Entrepreneurship in the United States, written by David Hart, Zoltan Acs, and Spencer Tracy, Jr. with funding from Advocacy, defines high-impact firms as those with sales that have at least doubled over the 2002-2006 period and which have significant employment growth during that time. The authors defined high-tech industries using research and development employment as a share of total employment as the key criterion.

For a complete copy of the report, visit www.sba.gov/advo. The Office of Advocacy, the “small business watchdog” of the federal government, examines the role and status of small business in the economy and independently represents the views of small business to federal agencies, Congress, and the President. It is the source for small business statistics presented in user-friendly formats, and it funds research into small business issues.

A new report from Diamond Management & Technology Consultants confirms that businesses are failing to take full advantage of online assets and that organizational investment rarely matches online’s economic potential. The report, “The New Online: Modernise or Fall Behind,” describes how companies can achieve step-change business improvement by enabling significant cost reductions, distinctive propositions, and upgraded customer experiences. It also identifies barriers to optimal decision making and outlines recommendations as to how these might be overcome.

Reflecting on the current situation, Diamond observes that online investments are often disproportionately geared towards cosmetic Web site upgrades. “Look and feel” changes are not sufficient to capture the new opportunities. Deeper and more sophisticated operational and technology capabilities must be developed. Diamond’s experience in advising blue chip companies confirms that the required online transformation is achievable and can drive material business benefits.

The report’s conclusion is that online is more than another channel. Rather, it is central to the business—a company’s central nervous system—and should be treated as such. Amongst the opportunities available to innovative companies are the ability to transform the user experience, for example through rich, personalised and humanised interactions, and the ability to reach and truly engage a broad and dispersed target community.

Taking a cross-industry approach, the report demonstrates how:

• A financial institution has used an online community to achieve a 40 percent increase in new account openings;
• An online retailer saw sales increase by 38 percent from real-time targeted marketing; and
• An insurance company realised significant efficiencies from rolling out Web capabilities to its intermediary agents, including a reduction in customer information upload time from 30 minutes to 30 seconds.

One of the main purposes of advertising is to help consumers decide what products and services they should buy or use. With so many different types of advertising being used today the question becomes what types are considered most helpful, that is they help people decide what products or services to actually purchase and which ones are most likely to be ignored or disregarded?

What Ads Are Most Helpful?

Over one-third of Americans (37%) say that television ads are most helpful in making their purchase decision while 17% say newspaper ads are most helpful and 14% say the same about Internet search engine ads. Radio ads (3%) and Internet banner ads (1%) are not considered helpful by many people. Over one-quarter of Americans (28%), however, say that none of these types of advertisements are helpful to them in the purchase decision making process.

Half of people aged 18-34 (50%) say television ads are most helpful while three in ten (31%) of those aged 55 and older say they find newspaper ads to be most helpful. There is also a slight regional difference. Two in five Southerners (40%) say they find television ads most helpful, while only one-third (33%) of Midwesterners feel the same.

What Ads do People Ignore?

Almost half of Americans (46%) say they tend to ignore Internet banner ads. Much further down the list are Internet search engine ads (17% of people ignore), television ads (13%), radio ads (9%), and newspaper ads (6%). One in ten Americans (9%) say they do not ignore any of these types of ads.

There are age and regional differences. Half of those aged 35-44 (50%) and 51% of Midwesterners say they ignore Internet banner ads compared to 43% of 18-34 year olds as well as Easterners and Southerners. One in five Americans 18-34 years old (20%) say they ignore Internet search engine ads while 20% of those aged 55 and older say they ignore television ads.

So What?

While advertisers scramble to create their ad campaigns, one thing they need to remember is that, even if viewership may be down and even with the increased use of digital video recorders so people can fast forward through commercials, television ads are the most helpful to consumers. Also, while an Internet strategy is essential for a comprehensive ad campaign, Internet banner ads are not considered helpful by few and are ignored the most. People are more likely to ignore ads on their computers but are more likely to pay attention to those on their television.

These are some of the results of a new AdweekMedia/The Harris Poll of 2,521 adults surveyed online by Harris Interactive between June 4 and 8, 2009.

A new survey released this past week revealed that nearly half of online shoppers have abandoned their carts multiple times in the past three weeks due to high shipping costs, security concerns and lack of convenience. The average cost of abandoned goods in U.S. shopping carts is $109. This data was supplied by PayPal.

High shipping costs was cited as the largest single reason for cart abandonment. While nothing could have prevented one-third of shoppers from abandoning purchases, the survey found that providing shipping costs upfront might have caused 40 percent to complete the purchase. To help merchants encourage shoppers to purchase, PayPal today announced a new Express Checkout feature – the PayPal Instant Update API. By integrating the new API, merchants can show order details earlier in the process including shipping options, insurance choices and tax totals.

“To get shoppers to buy, it’s critical merchants make the checkout experience easy and costs transparent,” said Eddie Davis, senior director of SMB merchant services, PayPal. “Our new PayPal Instant Update API will help merchants get customers the information they need upfront to drive sales.”

The survey also uncovered signs that the economy still has shoppers wary about clicking the “purchase” button. More than one-third of respondents abandoned checkout because they didn’t plan for all of the expenses; while more than 25 percent left the site to search for a coupon. However, one-third of shoppers later returned to the same site to buy. An additional 20 percent purchased the items at a brick and mortar store or competitor’s Web site.

“Merchants who don’t welcome back abandoners with open arms are leaving hundreds of dollars per shopper on the table,” added Davis. “Merchants need to remember the items that customers abandon and make it easy for them to buy when they return. Sweetening the deal with free shipping, coupons and special discounts is also a great way to encourage online shoppers to complete their purchases.”

Breakdown on Why Shoppers Abandon

At least a fifth of all U.S. survey respondents cited the following as very important reasons for cart abandonment:

• High shipping charges: 46 percent
• Wanted to comparison shop: 37 percent
• Lack of money: 36 percent
• Wanted to look for a coupon: 27 percent
• Wanted to shop offline: 26 percent
• Couldn’t find preferred pay option: 24 percent
• Item was unavailable at checkout: 23 percent
• Couldn’t find customer support: 22 percent
• Concerned about security of credit card data: 21 percent

Whether it is television ads, print ads, or even Internet pop-up ads, most people are exposed to dozens of them in the course of a single day. Considering the amount of ad exposure daily, a majority of Americans say they find current advertising to be interesting while two in five say it is not interesting. Advertisers, however, should not get too excited as less than one in ten Americans say current ads are very interesting while 47% say they are somewhat interesting.

How Interesting are Ads?

Younger adults and those with higher incomes are more likely to consider them interesting. Two-thirds of adults aged 18-34 (66%) and 60% of adults aged 35-44 think the ads are interesting as do 62% of those Americans with a household income of $75,000 or more. Conversely, over half of adults 55 and older (52%) say that current advertising is not interesting as do 46% of those aged 45-54 and those who have a household income between $35,000 and $74,999.

How Influential are Ads?

When buying products and/or services, over half of Americans (54%) say advertisements they had seen or heard were not influential when then made their last large purchase, with one-quarter (25%) saying they were not at all influential. One-third (35%) of Americans say the ads they saw or heard were influential.

Again, there is an age difference. Younger adults are more likely to say ads are influential when compared to the older adults. Six in ten adults aged 45-54 (60%) and 55 and older (62%) say ads are not influential with 31% of each age group saying they are not at all influential. But, just under half of adults aged 18-34 (45%) say the ads they may have seen or heard are influential in making their last large purchase.

So What?

These days advertisers are in a quandary. They need to promote their products and services yet be mindful of the fact that consumers are just not spending much money. How do they get their attention? Advertisers need to grab the consumers’ attention – make the ads stand out and that seems to be working, especially with the ever important 18-34 demographic. But, the sticking point is having the advertisements actually influence the purchase. One thing to remember is that some people don’t like to admit they were influenced – the fact that over one-third of Americans do admit to it means that advertisers are, in fact, getting the job done.

Forbes Insights and Google have released the results of a new study, “The Rise of the Digital C-Suite: How Executives Locate and Filter Business Information.” The complete study is available at: www.forbes.com/forbesinsights.

The findings clearly show that the Internet has become the chief source of business information, and that how the Internet is used frequently depends on the age and work experience of the executive. The study is based on a survey of 354 C-level and top executives at large U.S. companies (annual sales of greater than $1 billion).

“The common perception is that top executives at the largest companies do not use the Internet, but the reality is just the opposite,” said Stuart Feil, editorial director of Forbes Insights. “These findings show that C-level executives are more involved online than their counterparts, and younger generations of executives – those whose work careers have coincided with the growth of the PC and the Internet – are bringing profound organizational change to these companies.”

Highlights of the study:

• The Internet is the most valuable resource for executives for gathering business information, outstripping at-work contacts, personal networks, trade publications, etc. In fact, 74% of respondents rated the Internet as very valuable (5 on a 5-point scale).
• During work hours, 70% of executives prefer to read “traditional print media” online rather than in print (30%), and 69% prefer to access “traditional broadcast media” online rather than over the air.
• Over half of the C-suite respondents (53%) said they prefer to locate information for decision-making themselves, rather than start the process and forward it to others to complete (26%) or assign others to gather it (21%). Among non-C-level executives, 40% said they prefer to do it themselves.
• Search engines are the most valuable source for locating business information; 63% of executives rated them as “very valuable.” More interesting is the number of searches executives conduct daily. Overall, 60% of executives conduct 6 or more work-related searches each day, and 19% conduct 20 or more. Among executives under age 40, 74% conduct six or more searches, and 39% conduct 20 or more work-related searches each day.
• A big generational split occurs when it comes to what executives will click on. Those under age 50 are much more likely to click on online advertising such as paid listings in search engines, banner ads, pop-up ads, etc.
• Video is growing in importance – 24% of C-suite (compared to 16% non-C-suite) executives prefer reviewing business information via video. There’s a generational split here, too. Among executives under age 50, 33% view work-related video daily, and 26% view work-related video several times per week. For the 50-plus age group, 11% view work-related video daily, and 18% view it several times per week.
• Executives under age 40 (which the report calls “Generation Netscape”) are by far the most likely to engage with emerging Internet technologies:
  • 65% of under-40 executives maintain a work-related blog weekly or more frequently. That figure is 41% for 40 to 49-year-olds (“Generation PC”) and 10% for those above 50 years (“Generation Wang”)
  • 65% of the under-40 executives contribute to or read Twitter at least weekly. That drops to 44% for 40 to 49-year-olds and just 7% for those who are over 50 years old.