Customer Profile
Southwest Power Pool is a regional transmission organization that provides a reliable network for supplying power at competitive rates for the central United States. Founded as part of a joint effort of 11 regional power companies to support critical national interests, the company now manages the electricity distribution of high-voltage electricity over 60,000 miles of the region. Southwest Power Pool is headquartered in Little Rock, Arkansas, and is a non-profit corporation mandated by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
Business Challenges
With the FERC’s XBRL mandate being announced in June 2019, Southwest Power Pool had to ensure its readiness to file its Form 1-3Q in the new format. The finance team at SPP needed a solution that would make their FERC XBRL filing a smooth process.
The immediate challenges for Southwest Power Pool were:
- Understanding a new mandate with a closed XBRL taxonomy
- Identifying the right software for their FERC XBRL compliance
- Selecting a team with the right XBRL expertise and experience
- Getting the SPP finance team trained on the new software
Project Objectives
Southwest Power Pool used the user-friendliness of a FERC XBRL filing platform as a key criterion in their quest for suitable compliance software. SPP’s financial team conducted research and determined that IRIS CARBON® was the best FERC filing solution for them. Team IRIS CARBON® gave a detailed demonstration of the platform to the SPP finance team to familiarize them with the platform’s capabilities and workflows. We answered all their questions and determined their training needs during the demonstration.
We jointly identified the following project objectives
The IRIS CARBON® Approach
IRIS CARBON® handled the FERC Q3 2021 XBRL submission for Southwest Power Pool in three phases. A successful partnership between our customer success team and the client’s financial team was the key to the approach’s success.
In Phase I, the SPP finance team was introduced to the IRIS CARBON® platform and its functionalities. This phase included setting the right processes and workflows for uploading data from Microsoft Word and Excel sheets and ensuring the data goes into the right FERC form templates. We also decided on the workflows for effective collaboration between our teams.
Phase II was designed to help the finance team get acquainted with the FERC XBRL mandate and its requirements. Our customized training sessions helped the team understand the underlying XBRL principles in each schedule and collaborate using IRIS CARBON®’s workflows as well as the embedded checks and validations to generate and submit an error-free form to the FERC.
Phase III was about Southwest Power Pool’s actual Q3 2021 filing. SPP received timely support from us for a smooth and hassle-free filing. SPP’s acquaintance with the platform, coupled with our 24/7 support ensured that the Q3 filing was error-free, on time, and a huge success.
“I like the template upload feature for easy data capture into the platform. This platform is easy to navigate across the different schedules. Overall, I appreciate the quick response from the well-informed customer support team”.
Anita Mitchell
Senior Accountant
Key Results Achieved
The finance team at Southwest Power Pool was extremely satisfied with their Q3 2021 FERC XBRL filing experience with IRIS CARBON®. They were thoroughly impressed with the inbuilt user-friendliness of the platform. The auto data-upload capability and timely support from our customer success team were two of the highlights of this project that the SPP team appreciated.
Below are some of the key results achieved
