1. 58 IRmagazine.com | IR Magazine Summer 2016
Why more companies
today create IR
documents in-house
If you’ve worked with an external agency to create IR
documents like annual reports or proxy statements,
you’ve probably experienced the frustrations and
inefficiencies firsthand: the endless back-and-forth,
tedious text changes and innumerable versions from
every incremental update.
For decades, this was simply accepted as a fact of
life. Things started to change with the introduction
of regulatory reporting tools. These allowed teams
to collaborate to create reports in-house – but only
simple reports that followed strict templates, such as
the 10K. Despite the limits of these first-generation
platforms, they signaled the beginning of a major
shift toward in-house IR publishing.
Today, a new generation of cloud-based tools
has emerged, empowering companies to create
a colorful range of stylized reports, online annual
How US companies share annual reports with shareholders
10K alone 16%
10K & wrap 38%
10K & glossy summary 10%
10K & full glossy report 36%
How businesses produce stylized reports,
online annual reports and interactive
proxy statements in-house with
emerging cloud-based platforms
reports and interactive proxy statements, all from a
single source on one united platform. Let’s explore
how this new technology has evolved, why more US
companies are embracing it and where the future of
IR documents is headed.
A new generation of IR platforms
While the US typically leads global business trends,
this story begins in Europe, Canada and other
countries around the world, where corporations
widely embraced stylized documents and online
annual reports. Whereas US companies faced
strict regulatory requirements on the structure and
format of investor relations documents, other global
businesses were free to create more engaging,
readable and well-designed reports.
This also led to an increased interest in online
annual reports, which offered intuitive navigation,
engaging videos, interactive charts and custom
downloads. Naturally, companies wanted to release
print and online versions of these reports at the
same time, but using two separate production
processes to create the two formats proved time-
consuming and inefficient.
That business need subsequently spurred the
development of next-generation cloud platforms

2. 59IRmagazine.com | IR Magazine Summer 2016
About Tangelo
Tangelo is an enterprise software solution that simplifies the process of writing, managing and
publishing annual reports and other professional documents. Founded in the Netherlands, Tangelo has
operations in north-western Europe, North America and Asia-Pacific.
The cloud-based platform makes it easy to collaborate on a single source to produce print-ready
PDFs and online interactive content. With tools like Excel worksheet integration, configurable user
permissions and automatic formatting according to custom-style guidelines, Tangelo empowers teams
to work better together, saving time and resources while creating polished documents.
www.tangelo-software.com
Tangelo leads these new platforms for
in-house IR publishing
Among the new generation of tools, Tangelo is the
most popular, powerful and user-friendly platform,
enabling you to develop all these documents in-house,
from standard 10K, 20F and 40F reports, to glossies,
interactive online annual reports and proxy statements
– all from one cloud-based master document.
Trusted by many multi-billion-dollar companies,
including Philips and Randstad, our enterprise
software solution drastically streamlines your
production processes with its intuitive navigation
and numerous useful features. For example, Tangelo
allows you to interface with Excel files, so you can
synchronize updated financial figures across all your
varied IR documents in one click.
As the world of investor relations continues to
benefit from the latest technologies, teams can
spend less time worrying about the tedious process
of producing documents and more time focusing
on what really matters: engaging shareholders,
reinforcing their brand and fostering meaningful
connections in the modern world.
The latest trend: interactive proxy statements
The SEC requires listed US companies to issue a proxy
statement to shareholders in advance of their annual
meeting, and most businesses post a plain PDF online. In
recent years, however, forward-thinking companies have
engaged shareholders with stylized and interactive online
proxy statements.
With Tangelo’s cloud-based solution, it’s easy to
collaboratively create a stylized print proxy statement,
online interactive version and Edgar-formatted version
(required by the SEC) from the same in-house source.
that allowed companies to create, edit and publish
both print and online investor relations documents
from a single source – all in-house. Soon, even
companies that published only print documents
realized the utility of these collaborative platforms.
Creating reports in-house was now easier, faster,
less expensive and allowed companies to focus more
on quality content.
Why the US is embracing these
next-gen platforms
In true American fashion, it wasn’t long before
the US imported the best ideas to its own shores,
though companies there find themselves in a slightly
different situation. The SEC requires companies to
follow the rigid 10K structure and file annual reports
in the XBRL format. These requirements spawned a
dizzying array of financial printers, filing agents and
regulatory reporting tools.
Due to the technical structure and humdrum
typesetting of these reports, most US companies
moved to engage shareholders and analysts with
something more appealing:
n Wraps: two to 20 pages of more inviting content
surrounding the 10K
n Glossy summaries: engaging, high-level reports
that accompany the 10K
n Full glossy reports: comprehensive reports that
combine all the 10K’s financials with reader-
friendly narrative content.
Creating these wraps and glossies always involved
external design agencies. For full glossy reports,
which replicate the 10K’s financial statements and
notes, all these figures had to be typeset separately,
creating risks of accidental discrepancies between
the glossy and the 10K.
The 10K and reader-friendly content existed on
two totally distinct production paths, duplicating
efforts and frustrations. But just like the global
counterparts before them that struggled with
separate print and online reports, US companies are
beginning to embrace solutions that seamlessly unify
the two processes.
These next-generation platforms make it easy to
create, edit and publish various IR documents from a
single source – not just the 10K and stylized glossy
reports, but online annual reports and interactive
proxy statements, too. More than a stand-alone
tool, these solutions further provide personalized
consulting services, such as exporting your annual
report in a format optimized for XBRL tagging by
specialized service providers.