Mutual Fund Shareholder Report

Situation

• Grace and her team prepare a huge volume of reports every year, including semiannual and annual shareholder financial reports, plus quarterly forms and NQs for more than 100 mutual funds. Each month, the team produces and files up to 20 different reports.
• The team manages the report development and editing process, gathering input from the company’s accounting, legal, audit, finance, and performance departments.
• Because the company doesn’t have enough in-house resources, Grace had to rely on external vendors for graphics and SEC filing.  
• Each report took three weeks to produce and involved many days of back-and-forth emails with the designers, resulting in more lost time waiting for changes to be made.
• The team had no experience filing its own SEC reports and depended on a third-party vendor for that service.
• The company’s legal team, who was already using Wdesk, suggested that Grace adopt the reporting platform to streamline her process.
   

How Wdesk works for Grace

• A Workiva Customer Success Manager (CSM) trained Grace and her team on-site, showing them how to maximize Wdesk for their mutual fund reports. And the CSM remains available whenever there is a question.
• The application makes it easy for Grace and her team to file their own reports with the SEC on their own timeline.
• The all-in-one solution gives the team the power to produce, review, edit, print, blackline, and distribute reports without waiting for external vendors.

Results

• Wdesk saves the team two days per month, per report. That’s a total savings of 24 working days a year, which the team now applies to other value-added projects.
• The company cuts costs by eliminating the need for the external vendors.
• Incorporating Wdesk into its workflow helps the team find new and improved ways of process management across the board.
• Cloud-based access gives team members ultimate flexibility to work on reports when and where they want.
• Wdesk creates an automatic audit trail, so it’s easy to track who made changes and when.

Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.