How these numbers are made

Built by program, stopped by checks before it goes out

These pages are not written by hand. A program reads the filings each company sends the SEC and rebuilds this site from them, every business day. That kind of automation is not new or hidden — search engines have long treated it as ordinary for sports scores, weather forecasts and transcripts, and we use it here for financial filings instead. A person sets the rules the program follows and reviews what it produces; no page is drafted freehand.

Before a build goes out, a fixed set of checks runs over it, and any one of them can stop the whole site from publishing:

• A number printed without a filed figure behind it for that exact year — along with a handful of arithmetic and grammar mistakes: a percentage fall greater than 100% (that describes a sign flip, not a fall), a count that disagrees with itself in singular or plural, and two different totals for the same thing on one page.
• Any page whose 'generated on' date differs from the rest of the site — the whole site has to say it was built on the same day, not just the home page.
• A page that tells search engines to index it while also telling them not to, or the reverse — what we ask the search engine to do cannot contradict itself.
• Any page that shows interface text in the wrong language — a Portuguese page is not allowed to carry a Spanish label, and neither is allowed to carry English by accident.
• A page that links to something missing, and a page that nothing else on the site links to — both are refused before the site goes out.
• A day's numbers are kept out of the site entirely if that day's checks found the data measurably worse than the day before — this runs earlier, before a single page is built.

The source is the filing itself

Every figure on this site comes from the documents companies file with the SEC — the annual 10-K and its equivalents for foreign issuers. No third-party feed, no house estimate. Each value keeps the accounting tag and the accession number of the filing it came from.

256,049 checks per run

Before publication every company goes through proofs that compare its own numbers against each other: the balance sheet has to close, earnings per share has to match profit divided by shares, gross profit has to be revenue minus cost. What does not reconcile is published with a mark, never hidden.

A declared hole beats a guess

Four numbers people come looking for are deliberately absent: price-to-earnings, market capitalisation, dividend yield and price-to-book. All four need a market quote, each in a different place: price-to-earnings and price-to-book put the quote over earnings or book value per share, market capitalisation multiplies it by the share count, dividend yield divides the payout by it — and a quote is not a filed figure. Estimating one to complete the calculation would turn audited accounting into a guess, and the guess would look exactly like the rest of the page. So the number is absent, and says so.

Comparisons that do not hold are refused too. Where a stock split sits between two years, the ends of the series are not comparable, and the change is simply not computed.

The glossary

Each entry states the formula, the inputs and — the part most glossaries skip — what the number does not tell you.

5,250 companies

The universe covers companies with structured filings at the SEC, including foreign issuers reporting under IFRS. Funds, blank-check vehicles, warrants, preferred shares and listed debt are excluded — they carry the issuer's accounts but they are not the share.

A revenue floor on two of the six

Two rankings on the home page — “Best net margins” and “Fastest-growing revenue” — only consider companies whose most recent fiscal-year revenue is at least US$500 million. Below that floor, a high margin or a fast growth rate is too often an artefact of a small base rather than a signal readers would recognise — the floor is editorial, not statistical, and readers may disagree with where we set it.

A one-sided average, declared

Return on equity divides a year's profit by the average of the equity balance at the start of that year and at the end of it. Where the closing balance is missing from the filing and the opening balance is not, this site computes the ratio on the opening balance alone, instead of dropping a year that is otherwise fully reported. That is not a rare repair: 1,015 company-years on this site stand on a one-sided average. The page does not mark which years those are — this paragraph is the whole of the notice. Averaging against a balance we do not have is not available to us, and we would rather tell you the rule than let you assume the other one. Where neither balance exists, the cell is empty.

Identification only, no endorsement

Company logos are shown only to identify the company whose filings this page reports. They are the trademarks of their respective owners, and their presence here implies no affiliation with or endorsement by those owners.