RapidRatings strongly recommends that members submit their financial statements directly through the FHR Exchange rather than relying on publicly filed data. Even where a company's financials are technically accessible through public filings, direct submission is what unlocks the value of the platform for the member — access to the rating, control over disclosure, the ability to model scenarios, and the ability to reuse the rating with other clients. Submitting takes less than ten minutes.
Publicly filed data is not equivalent to member-submitted data
Publicly filed financial statements can differ materially from what a member would submit directly:
Currency. Statutory filings often lag by six to eighteen months from the close of the reporting period, depending on jurisdiction and filing type. A member submitting directly can provide the most recent completed period — including internal or draft statements — which produces a rating that reflects current financial position rather than a dated one.
Completeness. Some jurisdictions permit abbreviated, summary, or exemption-based filings that omit line items required by the FHR methodology. Member-submitted statements are the complete set, produced from the source records.
Accuracy. Filings pulled from third-party aggregators can include transcription errors, misclassified line items, or currency conversions that do not reflect the company's own reporting. Member submissions come directly from the company and eliminate that layer of variability.
For companies whose public filings are current, complete, and unabbreviated, the resulting rating may closely track a member-submitted rating — but the member has no way to verify that without a portal account, and no ability to correct discrepancies if the pulled data is wrong.
Direct submission is what delivers member value
The client's request is not for RapidRatings to source financial data on the member's behalf; it is for the member to participate in the FHR Exchange. Direct submission is what makes that participation meaningful.
Members who submit directly receive:
A portal account and visibility into the rating. Without an account, a member has no way to see the rating a client is receiving about them, no ability to understand which factors drove the result, and no channel to respond if the rating is unexpected.
Control over disclosure. Disclosure Levels allow the member to decide how much detail the client sees. A member without an account has no ability to make that choice — the default applied to any back-end sourced data may not be the level the member would have selected.
Access to ActionPath. ActionPath lets members model pro forma scenarios and show clients how planned changes would affect the rating. This is only available to members with active accounts.
Reuse across the client base. Once submitted, the rating is available to every client on the FHR Exchange that requests it, without the member repeating the process. Publicly filed data pulled for a single request does not create this reusable position.
A single, current record. Direct submission establishes the member's authoritative financial record on the platform and can be updated on a defined cadence, rather than depending on when third-party filings become available or are refreshed.
The submission process
Creating an account and submitting takes less than ten minutes. The standard required financial data is balance sheet and income statement (plus cash flow statement if produced), covering annual periods dated within the last twelve months. Unaudited, internal, and draft statements are accepted.
See Why do I need a RapidRatings account to submit my financials? for more on the account requirement, and How to Log In to the FHR Exchange once an account is active.