This article offers a brief explanation of terms commonly associated with our Fundamentals product.
Filing
A filing is a set of electronic documents filed by a company with the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC). Publicly traded, US-based companies are required to file an annual report called a 10-K and a quarterly report called a 10-Q. We primarily use these two kinds of filings for creating standardized financial statements.
Fundamental
A fundamental is a financial statement for a particular reporting period. For example, Apple’s income statement for 2019 Q1 is a fundamental. Their income statement for 2018 Q1 is another fundamental.
Multiple fundamentals are derived from a single filing, since companies are required to report the latest fiscal period alongside several previous fiscal periods.
Intrinio also creates a special fundamental called “calculations” in which we place numerous ratios and metrics that are derived from the reported fundamentals.
Financials
Financials are the line items on a fundamental – the actual data. For example, the Total Revenue on Apple's income statement for 2019 Q1 is a financial.
Intrinio offers both reported and standardized financials. Reported financials are the as-is line items that the company reported to the SEC. Standardized financials adhere to Intrinio's common financial statement templates and are thus easily comparable across companies.
Reporting Periods
An SEC filing will have data covering several reporting periods. Quarterly reports (such as Form 10-Q) are filed for each of the first three quarters of a company’s fiscal calendar. Form 10-K is filed for each fiscal year.
Companies are not required to file a 10-Q form for the fourth fiscal quarter (Q4) since this data can be calculated from the 10-K fiscal year data. Intrinio performs this calculation and creates a Q4 fundamental. Below is an example of fiscal periods, their required forms, and example dates (assuming the company’s fiscal calendar coincides with the calendar year):
|
Fiscal Period |
Required SEC Form |
Period Start Date |
Period End Date |
|
Q1 |
10-Q |
January 1 |
March 31 |
|
Q2 |
10-Q |
April 1 |
June 30 |
|
Q3 |
10-Q |
July 1 |
September 30 |
|
FY |
10-K |
January 1 |
December 31 |
Some companies have a fiscal year that does not follow the calendar year. Microsoft, for example, has a fiscal year that ends on June 30. Their 10-K would cover June 30 to July 1 of the following year.
Since companies don't report a Q4, we calculate Q4 by taking the reported FY figure and subtracting the Q1, Q2 and Q3 values to come up with the Q4 value.
The Balance Sheet is a point in time statement, so there's no difference between the 2019 FY balance sheet and 2019 Q4 balance. To reduce redundancies, we don't output a Q4 Balance Sheet statement, and instead strictly return the FY Balance Sheet. They'll match in values/dates exactly, since all Q4 Balance Sheets use the FY instead.
Data Tag
A data tag is used to describe a specific data point in the Intrinio data universe. We use data tags to catalog every kind of data that we have available. Every line item on our standardized template has an associated data tag, allowing you to look up that line item specifically. For example, if you wanted to look up Apple's net income over time, you could use the Historical Data API endpoint with the netincome data tag.
The directory of data tags is a useful resource for browsing the data we have available.