Workiva Inc. (Workiva) builds solutions to meet that demand and streamline processes, connect data and teams, and ensure consistency – all within the Workiva platform, the world’s leading cloud platform for assured integrated reporting.
The company builds solutions to meet that demand and streamline processes, connect data and teams, and ensure consistency – all within the Workiva platform, the world’s leading cloud platform for assured integrated reporting. Additionally, the company offers the...
Workiva Inc. (Workiva) builds solutions to meet that demand and streamline processes, connect data and teams, and ensure consistency – all within the Workiva platform, the world’s leading cloud platform for assured integrated reporting.
The company builds solutions to meet that demand and streamline processes, connect data and teams, and ensure consistency – all within the Workiva platform, the world’s leading cloud platform for assured integrated reporting. Additionally, the company offers the only unified software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that brings customers’ financial reporting, Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG), and Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) together in a controlled, secure, audit-ready platform.
From data to disclosure, the Workiva platform empowers customers by connecting and transforming data from hundreds of enterprise resource planning (ERP), human capital management (HCM), and customer relationship management (CRM) systems, as well as other third-party cloud and on-premise applications. Customers use the company’s platform to create, review and publish data-linked documents, presentations, and reports with greater control, consistency, accuracy, and productivity. The company’s platform is flexible and scalable, so customers can easily adapt it to define, automate, and change their business processes in real time.
Workiva provides more than 6,000 organizations across the globe with SaaS platform solutions to help solve some of the most complex reporting and disclosure challenges. While its customers use its platform for more than 100 different use cases, across dozens of vertical industries, the company organizes its sales and marketing resources into three purpose-built solution groups (Financial Reporting, ESG, and GRC) focusing primarily on the offices of the Chief Financial Officer (CFO), Chief Sustainability Officer (CSO), and Chief Audit Executive (CAE).
Growth Vectors
The company focuses its investment on four major growth opportunities: The Workiva Platform, Fit-for-Purpose Solutions, Global Expansion, and the company’s Partner Ecosystem.
The Workiva Platform: People all over the world use the company’s connected, cloud platform to seamlessly enable collaboration and deep integration into existing work streams to simplify their most complex reporting challenges. The company offers the only unified SaaS platform that brings customers’ financial reporting, ESG, and GRC together in a controlled, secure, audit-ready platform. The company’s platform creates a competitive advantage and positions it to win in the expanding business reporting market.
Fit-for-Purpose Solutions: Workiva is the leading provider of cloud-based reporting solutions that are designed to solve financial and non-financial business challenges at the intersection of data, process and people. The company is entering into new markets and geographies with an expanded solutions portfolio. Workiva focuses on growing its business through selling multi-solution deals and account expansions. Three solution groups that are part of this growth strategy are Financial Reporting, ESG, and GRC:
Financial Reporting is the company’s longest-tenured group of solutions and continues to represent a significant global opportunity for Workiva among private and public companies. The company’s customers' external and internal financial reporting processes have adapted significantly to accommodate factors, such as increasing regulatory pressure, integration of non-financial data and disclosures, as well as other considerations that influence financial reporting, such as economic volatility and geopolitical instability. Additionally, XBRL tagging is expanding beyond traditional financial statements and footnotes within regulatory filings.
Environmental, Social, Governance Reporting: ESG represents a generational opportunity for growth and the company plans to continue to accelerate its investments to meet stakeholders’ growing need for ESG information. In an increasingly transparent world, organizations across the globe are disclosing non-financial key performance indicators around environmental, social, and governance issues. ESG-related information is beginning to appear in mainstream financial reports and this trend will accelerate in the coming years. Workiva’s fit-for-purpose ESG solution provides an effective platform to help organizations manage, collaborate, and disclose their ESG information to stakeholders.
Governance, Risk, and Compliance: GRC is a broad market segment that can be defined by a number of solution areas including internal audit, internal controls, risk management, policy management, vendor risk, and IT risk. Risk Management is a high priority for CEOs and across boardrooms all over the globe. Workiva’s GRC solution suite enables and excels at identifying, tracking, and managing risk so that customers can operate legally, ethically, and in compliance with regulations. In December 2023, Workiva was named as a strong performer among GRC platforms by independent research firm, Forrester Research. The company will continue to leverage its GRC leadership to grow its business.
Global Expansion: In 2023, the company generated approximately 15% of its consolidated revenue from EMEA and APAC, and it expects these global markets to contribute an increasing percentage of total revenue.
Partner Ecosystem: The company’s ecosystem of partners extends its geographic reach, accelerates the usage and adoption of its platform, and enables more efficient delivery of professional services. The company intends to expand and deepens its relationships with global and regional partners, including global consulting firms, systems integrators, large and mid-sized independent software vendors and implementation partners. The company’s over 200 advisory, technology, and service partners offer a wider range of domain and functional expertise that broadens its platform’s capabilities and promotes Workiva as part of the digital transformation projects they drive for their customers.
Workiva Platform
The Workiva platform is multi-tenant cloud software deployed in multiple regions worldwide. The company’s platform, built primarily on Amazon Web Services (AWS), is composed of both proprietary and open-source technologies.
The company’s platform allows customers to connect data from multiple ERP, HCM and CRM systems, as well as other third-party cloud and on-premise applications with complete control, context, and clarity. Workiva's drag-and-drop data transformation and preparation capabilities deliver previews and provide insights instantaneously. Organizations can simply extract data from sources into the Workiva platform where they can perform queries, filter, and clean the datasets, and do it across millions of records that typical spreadsheets can’t handle. Once the data is connected in the Workiva platform, users can automate data and workflow updates, track every change and seamlessly collaborate with colleagues to create trusted reports and regulatory filings.
With its platform’s data-linking capabilities, every change is automatically updated in all linked instances—including narrative and numbers—throughout spreadsheets, word-processing documents, charts and graphs, presentation decks and dashboards in its platform. Linking enables data consistency and traceability and ensures that collaborators are working with the most current data.
The company’s platform's detailed audit trail provides accountability and transparency by tracking every change made by every user over time. A complete record of data provenance and all changes helps the company’s customers mitigate risk, gain insights and make better, data-driven decisions.
With permission controls in the company’s platform, administrators can manage access at all levels so each user can create, review and edit data and documents. This control feature also enables users to grant access to their external auditors, outside counsel and other consultants, which further streamlines the review process and reduces expenses.
The Workiva platform can be deployed within days or weeks for new customers and can be easily configured by the customer for individual employees or entire teams.
The architecture, design, deployment and management of the company’s solutions provide enterprise-grade scalability, availability and security. The performance of the Workiva platform has been tested and proven by some of the largest, most demanding enterprises in the world.
Frequent collaboration with customers and development iteration allow the company to make continuous improvements by releasing a new version of its platform several times each week.
The Workiva platform is designed to support millions of end users as a result of its scalability and the company’s relationship with AWS. The company’s customers have created billions of links to seamlessly achieve a single source of data, among multiple documents, spreadsheets and presentations.
Many of the largest enterprises in the world trust the company with their most sensitive data. The company employs stringent data security, reliability, integrity and privacy practices. In addition to its regular customer security assessments, the company engages in continuous and ongoing penetration and vulnerability testing (manual and automatic, internal and third-party) and adhere to standards established by third parties such as Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) and ISO 27001. The company also engages third-party auditors to evaluate its controls against the service organization controls (SOC) compliance frameworks.
In 2023, the company implemented its policy outlining the guidelines and principles for the responsible and ethical usage of AI and Machine Learning (ML) technologies within Workiva. This policy applies to all employees, contractors, partners, and other third parties who interact with or utilize AI/ML systems on behalf of their organizations. The use of AI/ML must be guided by principles of fairness, transparency, accountability, and respect for privacy and security. Customers are using the Gen-AI capabilities to author new content quickly, refine, edit, and rewrite content, generate ideas and perspectives, and research with a thought partner on demand.
The Workiva Marketplace enables organizations to streamline existing processes and solve new business problems by activating more than 200 ready-made templates and no-code data connectors, and services from industry experts and trusted partners — all within the Workiva platform’s connected and secure ecosystem. Its offerings include process checklists, carefully organized and linked reports, style guides, perfectly formatted presentations, and more.
Fit-for-Purpose Solutions
The company markets and sells over 30 fit-for-purpose solutions that are categorized into four reporting groups: Financial Reporting; ESG; GRC; and Industry Verticals.
Financial Reporting
Global Statutory Reporting: The company sees growing demand for its platform in the United States (U.S.) and in Europe for statutory reporting, which is a complex process for its multinational customers that are required to report statutory financial information throughout different countries and local jurisdictions where they do business.
Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and System for Electronic Document Analysis and Retrieval (SEDAR) Reporting: The company’s platform gives customers control over the entire SEC reporting process, from data collection to drafting to embedding supporting documentation to the actual filing with Inline XBRL. The company’s SEC reporting solution allows its customers to prepare and file all major SEC reports, such as Form 10-K, Form 10-Q and Form 8-K, as well as Form S-1 and other registration statements, proxy statements and Section 16 reports. Features tailored to the SEC reporting process include the capability to concurrently create reports in the HTML format required for filing on the SEC’s Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis and Retrieval (EDGAR) system and the ability to perform XBRL tagging as well as to submit SEC reports with Inline XBRL (iXBRL). Foreign Private Issuers can use the company’s platform to include XBRL tagging in their 20-F and 40-F filings with the SEC. Workiva also enables customers to create earnings press releases, earnings call scripts, presentations and other investor relations materials with data linked to the corresponding filing. Canadian issuers can use the company’s platform to draft and submit reports through SEDAR.
Capital Markets: Workiva offers an end-to-end technology platform supporting its customers throughout their journey as they move from being a privately held company to being publicly traded. The company’s platform approach and fit-for-purpose solutions provide a competitive differentiation in the market. Private companies can purchase the Workiva platform for financial reporting, management reporting and controls management. They may do this up to a year or two in advance of their target initial public offering (IPO) date. As these companies go through the IPO process, they then have the opportunity to use the capital markets solution on the company’s platform to manage the creation of their Form S-1 to register their securities with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Around the time they go public, many of these customers may then purchase the company’s SEC solution, which enables companies to prepare and file all major SEC reports, and expand the use of its platform to support their audit requirements under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX).
Annual & Interim Reporting: Workiva provides customers control over their entire financial reporting process, from data collection to drafting to embedding supporting documentation to submitting their financial statements to their board, ownership structure and/or debt holders. Workiva enables customers to manage their entire process of creating financial statements with more confidence through connecting directly to their financial source systems like ERPs and general ledgers. This reduces human error and increases data reliability during financial statement consolidation. Workiva also enables speed through automation which reduces the time-consuming, stressful process of gathering financial data, freeing your time for telling financial story.
European Single Electronic Format (ESEF): ESEF is an accelerator for modernization of corporate reporting in Europe. ESEF is an annual financial reporting regulation specified by the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA). The ESMA mandate requires all specified issuers on European Union (E.U.) & United Kingdom regulated markets to file annual account statements in a digital format using iXBRL. The key driver for ESEF is greater transparency and requires standardized reporting, consistently structured and accessible for stakeholders.
Management Reporting: Public and private companies, government agencies and higher-education institutions must create a vast array of complex financial and managerial reports. Organizations of all sizes typically have to collect, track, manage and report on a wide range of operating metrics to drive better business outcomes. The company’s customers continuously find new use cases across their organizations, including Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A), board/committee and quarterly reporting, C-Suite reporting, strategic business plans, financial statements, variance reports, monthly management reports, managing and tracking key performance indicators, data collection for domestic sales, performance reporting, and employee benefit financial statements.
Environmental, Social, and Governance Reporting
ESG Reporting: Workiva’s ESG Reporting solution enables organizations to deliver high-quality disclosures to their most important stakeholders, including investors, regulatory agencies, executive management, and their boards by connecting information directly across sustainability reports, statutory disclosures, annual reports, earnings call scripts, and regulatory filings, with support for XBRL tagging. The company’s platform also helps organizations proactively confront a complex and rapidly changing regulatory landscape to create integrated and assured reports that will address the disclosure requirements of the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) in the E.U., California’s Climate Corporate Data Accountability Act (SB-253) and Climate-Related Financial Risk Act (SB-261), and the proposed SEC climate disclosure rule in the U.S.
The company’s platform streamlines the ESG reporting process end-to-end, from data collection and management to final report. Customers use the company’s solution to collect quantitative and qualitative values to report for ESG topics, reference ESG frameworks and standards to align with stakeholder interests, request and track the data collection of ESG values, and connect information across reports, from sustainability reports to financial reports and internal presentations, to create a single source of truth for ESG metrics and disclosures.
Customers can use the ESG Explorer to review and compare guidelines from multiple frameworks and standards, including Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) Standards, Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB), Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD), and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
ESG Program, the digital hub on workiva.com, creates a connected and collaborative hub for ESG teams and stakeholders to operationalize their ESG initiatives. Customers can identify and organize the topics that are material to their organization, create automated processes to collect, review, and maintain metrics from systems of records and other data providers, and connect metrics to reports, presentations, and surveys, including submitting responses to CDP (formerly Carbon Disclosure Project).
Governance, Risk, and Compliance
Controls Management: The company’s customers use its platform to increase efficiency in documenting, implementing and assessing internal controls over financial reporting (ICFR) as required by SOX. SOX also requires public company Chief Executive Officers and Chief Financial Officers to individually certify that their annual and quarterly financial reports are accurate and complete and to assess the effectiveness of their ICFR. Increased scrutiny from the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board on audits of management’s assessment of internal controls – and the transition in the framework used for assessing internal controls – is driving public companies to find more efficient and accurate solutions for SOX compliance. The company’s customers can collect data from multiple departments, centralize that information in a linked platform, create and track process narratives and flows with co-workers, embed evidence and directly test controls.
Internal Audit Management: The company sells to the broad-based audit market because users in that market often collaborate with colleagues working in SOX, risk and controls across an organization. Internal audit management extends throughout an organization, attracting Workiva customers from a wide range of departments. Internal audit management includes audit risk assessments, the audit planning process, workpaper management, testing, issues management and audit reports that encompass the audit committee report and the internal audit group. Workiva enables simultaneous collaboration with control and accountability and enables robust documentation, accurate audit conclusions and complete audit trails, which are essential to auditors, executives and boards. With permission controls, administrators can restrict access at all levels for each user to create, review and edit data and documents that relate directly to them. This control feature also enables users to grant access to their external auditors, which further streamlines the review process and reduces expenses.
Enterprise Risk Management (ERM): With its platform, the company’s customers can integrate their risk management practices throughout the organization while maintaining information privacy, audit trails and security resulting in highly efficient and transparent compliance. The company also sells a solution for ERM to help enterprises identify systemic risks, determine risk probabilities, assess risk magnitude, plan strategic responses, report to boards and other stakeholders and ultimately make real-time ERM decisions.
Policy and Procedure Management: The company’s customers can use its platform to establish a connected, enterprise-wide policy and procedure management process. Teams can access and manage all content for policies, standards, procedures and guidelines for the entire enterprise in the company’s platform, and they can efficiently manage ongoing policy review cycles throughout the year. Customers can map policies directly to risks, controls, processes and regulations and create a consistent template-driven format or taxonomy for all policies. Customers can also distribute and track employee attestation of policies and procedures with automated certification reminders and progress dashboards.
Industry Verticals
Financial Services: The company markets its platform globally to banks, insurance and investment firms with fit-for-purpose solutions to simplify the complexity of regulatory, financial, risk and ESG reporting. Examples of banking regulations its customers face include global regulatory standards (Basel 1, 2 and 3); regional regulatory requirements (e.g., Federal Reserve for the U.S. and European Banking Authority and European Central Bank requirements across E.U. member States); and at the in-country level (e.g. Central Bank Stress Tests). These regulations cover a wide array of capital and liquidity standards that banks are required by law to disclose publicly, privately to regulators and internally to support board and executive level decision-making.
The company’s platform aids insurance customers to meet insurance regulatory requirements in the U.S. and globally. For example, in the U.S., insurers are regulated both in their state of domicile and in other states in which they are licensed to sell insurance, and Workiva supports insurance statutory reporting by state and other use cases such as actuarial memorandum. In Europe, the company assists its clients with their in-country regulatory reporting requirements, such as with the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority and the Basel norms for insurance companies. They use the platform to meet insurance reporting regulations for regulatory capital requirements and specific disclosure requirements publicly, privately to regulators and internally to support board and executive level decision-making.
The company also markets its platform to assists asset management firms and fund administrators with end to end internal and external fund reporting including financial, regulatory, and investor reporting.
Public Sector: State and local governments use the company’s platform to streamline and modernize Comprehensive Annual Financial Reports and budgeting. The company is also expanding adoption of its platform across U.S. government agencies. With its FedRAMP authorization, the company can help federal agencies connect, control and report up to 80 percent of their information types.
Energy & Utility Sector: Workiva provides connected reporting solutions that improve data accuracy for energy and utilities companies across state commission filings, utility rate making documents, SEC filings, financial and performance reports, and SOX documentation. The company markets its platform to help companies comply with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) XBRL mandate. More than 200 utility, natural gas, oil pipeline and centralized service companies are required to file quarterly and annual reports using XBRL.
Customers
Thousands of organizations, including global enterprises with hundreds of thousands of employees, trust Workiva. Customers include over 90% of the top 100 public and private companies that report annual revenue figures to a government agency, as well as over 85% of the top 500 companies, and over 80% of the top 1,000 companies. As of December 31, 2023, the company had more than 6,000 customers. The company’s customers are passionate, loyal supporters of its solutions, as demonstrated by its subscription and support revenue retention rate of 97.9% as of the December 2023 measurement date. The company’s subscription and support revenue retention rate including add-on solutions was 110.3% as of December 31, 2023.
Additionally, Workiva hosts Customer Advisory Boards (CABs) focused around three industry disciplines: Financial Reporting, ESG, and GRC that allow Workiva to listen and respond to evolving needs of the company’s customers. The company’s CABs are forums for leaders to exchange expertise and drive positive business outcomes in their organizations.
Sales and Marketing
Sales
The company sells its subscription contracts and related services globally, primarily through its direct sales organization which employs a combination of field sales, inside sales and partnership channels.
The company’s sales organization comprises sales development representatives, pre-sales engineers and account managers. The company’s sales development representatives qualify sales-accepted opportunities for its account managers. The company’s pre-sales engineers focus on solutions and custom product demonstrations and consultative sales. The company’s account managers work to attract new customers, as well as expand its platform into new use cases and departments across its current customers’ organizations.
The company’s customer success and professional services teams also help its account managers build its existing customer relationships by providing advice and best practices that enable users to harness the full power of its platform.
In 2023, the company continued to expand its ecosystem of partners, including global consulting firms, systems integration and technology firms, and leading regional consulting firms. The company’s technology partners enable powerful data and process integrations that enable its customers to connect their existing ecosystem of solutions directly to its platform. The company’s partners help to extend its customer reach through marketing and promotion and help accelerate the sale and delivery of its platform.
Marketing
The company’s marketing organization promotes its brand, generates demand for its offerings, and researches and assesses product market needs. The company’s advance planning team assesses customer needs, conducts industry-based research and identifies new markets. The company’s demand generation programs are categorized by technology solution and industry and is focused on engaging business leaders, process owners and technology teams. The company uses a variety of marketing programs across traditional and social channels to target current and prospective customers. The company’s marketing team hosts virtual and in-person events to educate prospects and customers and generate demand for its solutions.
Customer Success and Professional Services
The company’s customer success and professional services teams help its account managers build relationships with customers by providing advice that enables them to harness the full power of its platform.
Customer Success: The company’s customer success team partners with users of its platform to understand their business objectives and offers best practices in the use of its software. The company delivers 24/7 live customer support via phone, digital messaging and web-based conferencing. The company provides intensive training to its customer success team and segment them for each solution and market focus.
Professional Services: The company’s professional services include initial setup of documents; XBRL mapping, tagging and review; best practices implementation; and business process consulting. The company’s XBRL team of accounting and financial reporting professionals provide XBRL mapping, tagging and review services to its customers. The company also employs a team of consultants who offer services to customers to improve and streamline their Workiva-related data processes.
The company pays for employees to maintain professional certifications and licenses that are important to its customers, and it hosts regular company-wide employee education sessions on business, industry, technology and workplace topics.
Intellectual Property
As of December 31, 2023, the company had 76 issued patents and 17 patent applications pending relating to its platform or related technology. The company has registered a number of trademarks and logos, including Workiva, Wdesk and Wdata with the United States Patent and Trademark Office and in several jurisdictions outside U.S. States.
History
The company was founded in 2008. It was formerly known as WebFilings LLC and changed its name to Workiva LLC and converted from a California limited liability company to a Delaware limited liability company in July 2014. In December 2014, the company converted from a Delaware limited liability company to a Delaware corporation and changed its name to Workiva Inc.
