With the recent news about the SEC data breach, people are looking towards their own internal security practices to ensure they are handling their data responsibly and doing everything possible to prevent their own data breaches. In the financial document preparation and submission industry, one of the most common pieces of private data that is passed back and forth through email is a filer’s CCC. To file a document on behalf of a company, you only need their CIK (which is publicly available) and the CCC (which is not supposed to be publicly available). It follows then that if an unauthorized entity obtains a CCC, they could fraudulently file on a company’s behalf to the SEC. So it’s in your best interest to keep your CCC secret!

HTML is the primary document type submitted to the SEC now. Every filing needs to have a primary document, and that primary document is almost always an HTML file. Because EDGAR HTML is a very specific type of HTML, you need special tools to create and convert these documents. Software packages like GoFiler exist to make this process as easy as possible, but in the end it still involves some level of user interaction to convert the document from a source file, make sure it converted alright, fix any issues, proof it, and either submit it or send it back to the client. Well, using Legato, we can cut a few steps out of that by making an HTML template that’s filled in with data populated from a data file!

New rules go into effect next month requiring that filers insert hyperlinks into their exhibit indices to link directly to referenced filings and exhibits. For a small filing, maybe this isn’t too arduous a task to do by hand. But for a large one? The process can be a real pain, particularly if you don’t know the links of the exact exhibits that need to be included. GoFiler has now included a tool (written entirely in Legato by our development staff!) to help users locate and automatically include exhibits. It’s pretty powerful, allowing the user to build a local cache of filings from the EDGAR system based on a particular CIK. This cache can be searched and sorted, so it becomes much easier to find the filing you need to link.