Methodology

Where the data comes from

Every figure originates in a 10-K or 10-Q a company filed with the SEC, read through the SEC’s companyfacts API. That API publishes facts tagged with the standard US-GAAP taxonomy and reported without segment dimensions — consolidated figures, in other words. Nothing is typed in by hand and nothing comes from a data vendor.

That boundary has a consequence worth stating: a company whose consolidated total is tagged with a concept it defined itself is invisible to this source. APA Corporation reports its top line as apa:RevenuesAndOther, and all ninety of the us-gaap:Revenues facts in its annual report are segment breakdowns. Its revenue reads as unavailable here, and no amount of re-fetching changes that.

How a period is chosen

An annual period is a reported duration of 350 to 380 days, which admits the 52- and 53-week fiscal years retailers use without admitting a half-year. Quarters must be reported as 70 to 110 days, or be derivable from consecutive cumulative figures that share a fiscal-year start. Each company keeps its own calendar; the year shown is the calendar year the period ended in.

The period axis is anchored on revenue where a filer reports it, and on net income or operating cash flow where it does not. That fallback exists because anchoring on revenue alone discarded entire companies: Truist and Synchrony report every quarter and tag no consolidated revenue concept at all, and ten years of correct balance sheets went with the missing top line.

How one figure is chosen from many

A company reports the same period repeatedly — in the original filing and again as a comparative in later ones — and often under more than one concept. Selection takes the most recent filing first, then the preferred concept among what that filing used.

That order is deliberate and it was measured. Microsoft’s 2017 revenue is $89,950m under SalesRevenueNet in the 2017 annual report and $96,571m in every filing since, restated under the revenue-recognition standard adopted later and tagged with a lower-ranked concept. Preferring the higher-ranked concept would republish a figure the company has superseded. Across 19,670 figures the two orders disagree twenty times, and the filer’s latest word wins each one.

Calculated figures

Some metrics are read from a filing and some are calculated: free cash flow from operating cash flow and capital expenditure, margins from their components, growth from two adjacent periods. Calculated values are labelled. A figure a company reported always outranks one calculated here, and a calculation whose inputs come from different filing vintages is withheld rather than mixing restatement bases.

Missing is not zero

Where a figure is unavailable the site shows a dash and a reason. It is never replaced with zero, inferred from a similarly named concept, or reconstructed by summing segments. A company that reported nothing and a company that reported zero are different facts.

Two figures are also withheld on purpose. Where revenue, cost of revenue and gross profit cannot all be true at once, the cost and profit are withheld, because which of the two is wrong is not knowable and publishing either would be a guess. Where a diluted share count contradicts net income and earnings per share by orders of magnitude — a filer tagging millions while the unit says shares — the count is withheld rather than rescaled by assuming what was meant.

Banks, brokers and insurers

These filers present a top line that is not an operating company’s revenue: net of interest expense, or premiums earned. The figures are theirs and are traceable, but ranking them against a retailer compares different measures, so they are labelled and a screen can exclude them. Measures built on an operating model are not shown as headline figures for them either — a broker’s operating cash flow moves with its trading book, so free cash flow computed from it describes nothing anyone means by the term.

What is checked

Each published period is tested against the identities its own statements must satisfy: assets equal liabilities plus mezzanine and equity; revenue less cost of revenue equals gross profit; and operating, investing and financing flows plus the effect of exchange rates account for the change in cash. Failures are published alongside the company rather than hidden, because a reconciliation that does not hold is information about the data.

The exchange-rate term in that last identity is there because leaving it out flagged every multinational. Coca-Cola’s 2024 discrepancy was 623,000,000 against an exchange-rate line of −623,000,000 — equal to the dollar.

What this is not

There are no market prices, valuations, forecasts or analyst estimates here, and no segment data. The source cross-checks sample values against the inline XBRL in the original filings; that is a check on extraction, not an audit of the accounting. See the disclosures for what that means for a reader.