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Welcome to Colonial Help Center

Review frequently asked questions for EDGAR support and tips.

EDGAR

Financial Printing

Newswire

Paying Filing Fees

XBRL

Is there a setup fee for EDGAR services?

No, we do not charge a setup fee for any of our services.

Please send all documents to edgar@colonialfilings.com and someone from our team will confirm receipt.

Yes. Please contact us to learn more about our flat-rate packages and unlimited filing services.

To setup an account, please give us a call at our toll free number at (877) 285-8605 or visit our Starting Up page.

Colonial Filings, Inc. is a market leading EDGAR filing agent with over 30 years of industry experience. We have the know how and resources to ensure your filings are submitted on time, in a professional manner, at a low cost. All of our filing is done in-house, and all of our customer information is protected by a rigorous set of security systems and procedures. For more information on why you should file with Colonial Filings, please see our Why Choose Colonial Filings page.

The Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval (EDGAR) system is the SEC’s interactive database that assists in filing processing. For more information regarding our EDGAR filing services, please visit our EDGAR filing page.

In order to register as an EDGAR filer and create the required SEC EDGAR filing codes, a Form ID must be submitted to the SEC. Form IDs are submitted electronically through the EDGAR Filer Management website. After we successfully file your Form ID with the SEC, we will generate access codes for you.

If you have lost your EDGAR codes and would like to generate new ones, we can prepare a passphrase update submission for you. For more information contact us.

It typically takes two business days for the SEC to review a Form ID. However, we can expedite that for you if you need. For more information and/or assistance, please see our Form ID page.

Mailing and contact information can be updated online via the EDGAR filing website. This includes:

  • company/individual’s name
  • IRS number
  • State of incorporation
  • fiscal year end
  • address
  • internet and e-mail address
  • accountant name and address

Note that the SEC needs to approve name changes and that it will not show up online until your next filing. If filing codes need to be updated, the client should use the Filer Management website.

Commonly used SEC forms and templates can be found on our Forms page, or you can view a full list on the SEC website. The Index to Forms may also be helpful for choosing the right form to use.

Our average turnaround time for the first proof is one to three hours for larger documents and less than one hour for smaller documents. For more information and/or assistance, please see our EDGAR Filing Services page.

An EDGAR filings maximum size is 100MBs (megabytes). Most filings will never come close to this limit.
According to the EDGAR filer manual a submission may include a maximum of 612 documents in the following combination: .One main submission document .One hundred correspondence .Ten covers .Five hundred exhibits .One EU-1 (NASAA document)

The SEC observes a range of government holidays, for a complete list please see our SEC Filing Calendar page.

An amendment is an alteration to an already filed EDGAR submission. Amendments are usually made in response to a request by the SEC reviewer.

An amendment can be submitted in one of two ways. As your filing agent we can a) EDGARize and file a new amended document, or b) simply make the necessary amendments to the previously filed document and re-file it. EDGARizing a new amended document will take more time and in the end will be more costly.

The SEC EDGAR system makes available the option of redlining or highlighting the amended text in the submission. The highlighted text will be bolded in a magenta color in order to differentiate it. This special feature can be particularly useful if you wish to alert the SEC reviewer of the amendments within the document. Redlines are only viewable to the SEC.

The redlining feature is activated by surrounding the text in question with ASCII or SGML <R> tags. These tags are a special feature utilized by the SEC reviewers software which will highlight the text they surround in bold magenta color in order for the SEC reviewer to differentiate it from the rest of the submission.

Before filing we will send you two separate proofs via e-mail, one with redlining if requested, and one without, for your review. These proofs will be in PDF format, and will simulate what the SEC reviewer will see. You will be able to determine exactly what areas of the document will be highlighted in bold magenta color.

Redlining is not disseminated to the public, only the SEC reviewer will see them. The SEC submission software will replace the redline tags with blank characters which will not be visible within a browser, but will be in the HTML source code.

To update the SIC code associated with a company you will need to speak to a representative from the SEC’s legal division. Call the EDGAR support line at 202-942-8900 for more information.

What is your pricing for financial printing?

Financial printing costs depend on the type of printing that you are doing. We offer black and white, color, financial printing bindings, saddle-stitch, and more. Please contact us for a quote. You can also send an email to sales@colonialfilings.com.

Please contact us for a quote. You can also send an email to sales@colonialfilings.com.

How do I sign up for the exclusive newswire discounts (provided by NASDAQ)?

To receive the financial direct newswire discount at $195 (flat-rate, unlimited word count) or the 20% off of full services through NASDAQ, you would need to contact us to setup the account.

Financial printing costs depend on the type of printing that you are doing. We offer black and white, color, financial printing bindings, saddle-stitch, and more. Please contact us for a quote. You can also send an email to sales@colonialfilings.com.

Yes, you can distribute and target locally, regionally, and nationally throughout the U.S. This would fall under NASDAQ’s full-service press releases.

What EDGAR filing fees are there?

SEC filing fees are only applicable to certain filing types and are based on the number and value of securities involved. Visit the SEC website to learn more about filing fees.

Colonial Filings will submit a test filing before sending the document to the SEC to determine whether there are sufficient funds for the given filing. We can also login to account online to check your balance at any time.

How do I know if I have sufficient funds in my SEC account?

XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) is a standard programming language used to exchange and disseminate corporate reporting information. XBRL is XML-based, using XML syntax and other XML technologies to create unique, predefined data tags (like barcodes) identifying the information’s content and structure. In the U.S., the SEC requires reporting companies to tag financial statement line items and financial notes and schedules with pre-specified taxonomies (GAAP, Mutual Funds, NRSRO, IFRS). The SEC believes this new system will make capital markets more efficient because the interactive, searchable data will provide investors and others with easy access to information. Learn more here.

XBRL increases the speed at which investors, anlaysts, and the SEC are able to manipulate and compare data across companies and industries. XBRL files are downloadable into spreadsheets, for easy manipulation of data, thereby giving more efficiencies to the financial markets. This increases the transparency of smaller reporting companies to the financial markets.

The following documents require an XBRL component:

Annual Reports on Forms 10-K, 20-F, 40-F.
Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q.
Transition Reports on Forms 10-Q, 10-K, and 20-F.
Securities Act Registration Statements containing financial statements including Forms S-1, S-3, S-4, F-9, F-10, S-11, F-1, F-3, F-4.
Updated or revised financial statements on Forms 8-k and 6-K.

PCompanies are required to file the first XBRL submission concurrently with the traditional filing as an exhibit to the Form 10-Q or annual report on Form 20-F or Form 40F.
Interactive data must also be posted to the corporate website the earlier of the end of the calendar day submitted or the required filing deadline.
Subsequent required filings include 10-K, transition reports, registration statements ( excluding IPOs and pre-priced registration statement filings), Form 8-K and Form 6-K containing Financial statements.
Exceptions
30 day grace period – first time interactive data exhibit is submitted
30 day grace period – first time footnotes and schedules are tagged in detail If issuers opt to take advantage of the grace period, the XBRL filing must be submitted on Form 10-QA.

It is a global phenomenon with taxonomies being developed and adopted around the world. The SEC mandate for XBRL regulatory reporting represents the world’s largest capital market to report interactive data, but XBRL is already in use by governments, regulators, banks, agencies, and public and private businesses worldwide in a wide array of applications. Although XBRL was first developed in the U.S., China was the first to mandate its use, in 2005, by the Shanghai Stock Exchange. Australia and Japan soon joined the ranks of early adopters. Although the U.S. and Asia have focused on using XBRL in capital markets, Europe uses it for a wide array of electronic-government and cross-border applications, allowing European governments, banks, and businesses to share consistently structured XBRL data.

XBRL reporting requirements do not apply to:

Initial-public-offering registrations (Section 16).
Registration statements under the Exchange Act on Forms 10, 20-F, and 40-F.
Pro forma financial statements prepared in accordance with Article 11 of Regulation S-X.
Financial information or financial statements that are not the filer’s (i.e., financial statements of a material acquired .under Rule 3-05 of Regulations S-X and financial statements of a company being acquired or merged, if they are provided in .S-4, are not required to be included in an XBRL exhibit).

Quality and Accuracy – Because financial data is tagged and saved just once, quality and integrity of the data is increased greatly. Margin for error is minimal across financial statements because once tagged, information that is transferred does not change. There is no need to enter financial information more than once, greatly reducing risk of data entry error.

Accessibility – XBRL provides a framework that may be used by all companies, but which is flexible enough to be customized for industry needs as well as an organization’s internal needs. Information can be used and received in a format preferred by the user.

Productivity – Because the information is tagged once and only once, documents can be prepared more time and cost efficiently, financial information retrieved and shared more quickly and easily, and published online or sent to a financial printer, or uploaded faster.

Overall Consistency – Because information is available either directly from the company or from the SEC’s XBRL based Interactive Financial Report Viewer (IFRV) at no charge, cost of said information is reduced. Fee based databases will still be valuable to investors since they aggregate this information across thousands of companies and provide users with the ability to simultaneously download information on thousands of companies rather than just one at a time. Fee-based databases will also benefit from XBRL because their data will be more accurate, being aggregated electronically rather than manually which creates room for error. By significantly reducing or eliminating manual data entry, XBRL should reduce the cost structures at database companies, which could lead to more competitive pricing. In the end, better data adds more integrity to our financial system. This is especially true given that there are more and more quantitative analysts screening enormous amounts of data across thousands of companies and often times their computer programs focus on data outliers. In practice, a lot of the outliers in large data screens are due to data inaccuracy. XBRL helps to reduce or eliminate this data inconsistency.

The core financial statements and footnotes including:

  • Balance sheet
  • Income statement
  • Statement of comprehensive income
  • Statement of Cash Flows
  • Statement of Owner’s Equity

The schedule for financial statement footnote tagging requirement is:

  • Block text only in year one
  • Detail tagging after year one
  • Optional tagging of narrative information
  • Calculations of balance sheet data

As XBRL developments unfold, companies will begin to think of their financial data as intellectual property and will treat it as financial media, making it available with built-in feedback loops to find out more about how the data is being used. With this information in hand, organizations can continuously improve their reporting processes.

As a result:

  • Reports can be prepared selectively and/or more frequently. Thus some reports may be uploaded weekly instead of following the common monthly distribution patterns.
  • Users can more easily work with the data. Thus, static graphs can be replaced by interactive charts and tables and users won’t need extensive training or advanced skills to get desired results.
  • Operating efficiency and effectiveness are likely to improve as data becomes more accurate, which may in turn improve decision-making.
  • Users can devote less time to reading, comprehending and analyzing data.
  • Preparer processing times for publishing and distributing documents will be reduced.
  • Cycle time is shortened, so reports can be disseminated more quickly.
  • Entities can expend less effort and fewer resources to meet reporting obligations.