SEC building

After finishing his M.S. in computer science at New York University (NYU) in 2016, Sundeep Narang had plans to pursue a Ph.D. Those plans were quickly derailed after meeting David Rosenfeld, co-owner at Quality EDGAR Solutions.

Rosenfeld offered Narang a job as lead developer at Quality EDGAR Solutions, replete with the autonomy to design and develop tools for the company at a much faster clip than he could within academia. “Once I came to the startup work, it was more exciting. You build them and you get to see them in a month. That was the reason I jumped over,” he said.

The recruitment has paid off in spades for Quality EDGAR Solutions. Narang developed his latest tool, EDGAR Edge, in just months. The tool is also Narang's fourth major development for the company.

EDGAR Edge can take the highly stylized documents prepared for shareholders and reformat them so they can be directly filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) without chopping out the design. The SEC uses an online public database system—Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval (EDGAR)—to manage its digital regulatory filings for public companies.

“One of the pain points if you have these big corporations that are designing these documents for their shareholders, they're putting a lot of money and effort into the design of these documents,” Narang explained. Those documents are typically designed in a typesetting software, something like Adobe InDesign, making them fairly difficult to import into EDGAR-compliant HTML.

Narang found a way to translate the complex document formatting in typesetting applications into HTML, meaning that businesses can file their stylized documents while retaining the flashy design that sets their documents apart. The tool also operates across every internet browser, even Internet Explorer, “the worst one,” as Narang noted.

The tool is an effort to help companies match their EDGAR filings to their printed material. Rosenfeld explained in a statement that prior to EDGAR Edge's release, software companies had a hard time translating document formatting into EDGAR HTML. “The HTML then required heavy cleanup of the formatting, which eliminates the value of a single source system. When we created our product, it was an absolute necessity that all of the formatting would be sustained in the EDGAR HTML conversion to maintain the integrity of the single source,” he said.

EDGAR's system is one of the oldest federal government digital filing systems. While it's not the most beautiful government-run online database portals in existence, Narang has seen EDGAR continue to improve standards in its operating system, especially by allowing third-party software providers to link into its functioning.

Despite these improvements, Narang sees a continued role for third party software providers to link businesses into government portals for the foreseeable future. “You're going to need some kind of way to aggregate the data and pass to back to the SEC,” he said.