Calcbench, a new startup working out of Cambridge, MA and New York, came to being from an app design challenge put on by the people behind XBRL, a technology standard the SEC requires public panies to use in reporting financial data.

Yes, the terms app challenge and SEC did in fact appear in the same sentence. XBRL, which stands for extensible business reporting language, was developed by the SEC and the Financial Aounting Standards Board (FASB) as one of many measures to improve financial transparency among publicly traded panies. But there’s even more that can e of the XBRL use, says Calcbench -founder Pranav Ghai, who’s based in New York.

“Nobody seems to be using the data once it’s there,” says Ghai.

So the small team at XBRL put out the call to app developers to build tools that analyze the data panies are required to report. “People are reporting the information because they have to, not because they want to,” and this ntest is out to bring some more life to the system, says Calcbench -founder Alex Rapp.

Rapp, who works out of Cambridge’s Dogpatch Labs, had been working on his own startup, llaborative Reasoning, when he reunited with former llege roommate Ghai. Both have backgrounds in the finance world, and decided to take a shot at the XBRL Challenge in August.

The Calcbench app, released Friday, plugs into the XBRL data to aess quarterly documents such as earnings statements, cash flow statements, and pany balance sheets. Users enter a ticker to aess that information for a particular pany, and Calcbench’s engine pulls all the information into a more readable, interactive format. (The SEC’s EDGAR system has also begun to display this data more interactively.)

Calcbench also plugs in its own custom calculations such as debt to equity ratios and operating margins to go beyond the information reported in the filing. Users can pare the data to past quarters or past years, and can also pare it to other panies. They can also leave notes on the documents to share with others, a llaboration artifact of Rapp’s previous project, llaborative Reasoning, which was developing plug-ins for group llaboration on Microsoft Outlook. (That hasn’t yet captured an audience and is on the back burner for now, says Rapp.)

The financial information is already aessible through existing but very expensive financial data services, like Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters, which aren’t a realistic option for individual users like freelance financial journalists. Calcbench is also targeting lawyers, aountants, investors, and financial analysts. Those looking to aess the information on their own have typically had to go through the SEC web manually. Calcbench is also different in that it pulls directly from the pany-supplied data, while other analytical tools rely on third party information. That means it’s also subject to the errors panies make when reporting the information, but the Calcbench engine can help catch those mistakes and inform XBRL, says Rapp.

Other startups have tackled the ncept of making sophisticated financial data more aessible. Screener. sells its financial analytical tool, using calculations built on on ThomsonReuters data, for $24.95 per month to personal users and $49.95 to professional users.

Calcbench is vying for a $20,000 grand prize that XBRL Challenge will award in February. But Ghai and Rapp are looking for the app to have life beyond that. The hope is that the tool will be able to support itself through display ads. It’s initially looking to add works to serve those, but will target more strategic financial services advertisers if it gets enough momentum. Calcbench uld also make money off a premium offering that includes more specialized calculations for the data, and it uld develop it for individual broker dealer firms to use as their own branded tool, says Rapp.