ETQ headquartered in Burlington offers the ETQ Reliance Platform, a quality management solution designed to meet a business' unique quality needs and risks with an automated best practice-driven software solution.
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Wdesk
Score 7.0 out of 10
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Wdesk from Workiva is a cloud platform designed to provide collaboration, data integration, and an audit trail. Wdesk helps mitigate risk, and improves productivity
ETQ Reliance is great for quality systems in which different levels of personnel are accessing common documents. The user interface and basic functionality is very intuitive, and thus easy to navigate for both novice and experienced technical users. It is also great at organizing tasks and maintaining document attributes. Overall, great for the purposes of an audit. For more advanced users, it may be limited in functionality. Data analytics and related visualization is more easily done after exporting data and manipulating in third-party software programs.
Wdesk is best suited for companies with demanding SEC filings and documents, with multiple revisions due to auditor/counsel review, and where financial reporting is extremely manual. Wdesk really helps take out the potential errors out of extremely manual processes, and helps automate regular financial reporting by allowing companies to link financial information and build customized flows of their information into financial statements and other documents (such as presentations or other internal reporting).
The biggest strength of the program for our team is that multiple users can work in the document at the same time. Multiple users can be in the program updating financial statements, footnotes, MD&A - all without stepping on each other's toes.
Rolling forward the documents from one period to the next is pretty simple. Links to source documents are maintained and new ones can be added without much hassle.
Edits and changes can be made right up until the last minute before filing. There is no waiting period or pencils-down period unless we enforce one ourselves - the Financial Reporting team is in control of the timing of our filings.
Overall it's a good-to-go product because of its features. It's easy to set up, meets requirements, has quality support, etc. So far, it has been working quite well for me, and I wish to continue using it for as long as it meets my requirements.
At the basic support level, you get adequate support, but you are likely to be passed around from one tech support rep to another even on the same problem. Some of the support staff are both technically strong and have good interpersonal communication skills, others less so for the latter. Recently it seems that ETQ wants to monetize more of their support services both in multi-level support as well as in seeming to move some services from included in annual support to a fee basis (for on-premise deployment).
Workiva's technical support is impeccable and undoubtedly one of the best. The times we needed them, they were super quick and willing to help. It works 24 hours a day, and there will always be someone to help with doubts or technical problems regarding the tool.
Prior to ETQ we were using spreadsheets and shared drives and the ability to pull information was challenging. It was a very manual process done by many people. Now, it is somewhat manually input by one or two people and the retrieval of information can be done by anyone anywhere with ease.
We moved from a third party filer to doing it in house. Have seen demos of products like Active Disclosure, which has come a long way from the beta version I saw and but we are not too far gone with Wdesk for us to evaluate other products. When we first signed up with Webfilings, (former name of Workiva), there were no viable products in the market. I had seen an Oracle product and a beta version of Active Disclosure. It was not hard to see the ease and intuitive-screens, to guide one through the filing process. The excel-like spreadsheets were an added bonus.
Has saved a lot of time in preparing for audits. In an organization with multiple franchises, the cost savings from reduced man-hours is well in the $500K+ per year range.
Cloud capability has saved on document storage and hardware costs. The cost of storing online is low and has saved up to $100K per year in hardware and data maintenance costs.
Reduced need for third-party document control applications. ETQ Reliance has eliminated the need for other software applications to support quality document maintenance.
We spend less than we used to with a traditional printer.
We have been able to do turn-on-a-dime equity offerings with last minute changes and still file on time.
Inviting external legal into the platform has helped with communication but we actually suspect they spend MORE time (and billing) on our documents than they used to just simply because it's so easy to get at them anytime they want.
