We publish Standardised, rather than the company specific, financial statements to meet the needs of subscribers who wish to swiftly compare fundamentals between different companies. Standardised data is ideal in making like-for-like comparisons across industries and markets - and perfect for screening.

The standardised financials include detailed annual and interim statements (including Income Statement, Balance Sheet, Cash Flow), key footnote information and originally reported and restated financials.

The outcome of this is that line items in the accounts are presented on a consistent basis across companies in the universe. This is what enables reliable and fair screening across such broad ranges of companies for services like ours.

Data collection begins with Thomson Reuter’s analysts being alerted whenever companies file financials, or publish a press release with relevant financial information. Once the analyst has access to the relevant source documents, the financial information is collected into a Company Specific format.

In this format analysts collect every data item reported by companies on their Income Statement, Balance Sheet and Statement of Cash Flow. For some non-US companies, certain footnote items are also captured on the financial statement.

This data is then converted into the Standardised format we publish on the website. For example, a company such as Google may report multiple company specific revenue items - e.g. for advertising, mobile revenue and miscellaneous sales. Each of these are combined into a single standardised “Revenue” figure to allow easy comparison across different companies.

Refinitiv classify companies into one of 4 account ‘templates’ and then standardise the financial statements based on their classification. The 4 template categories are Utilities, Industrials, Banks and Insurance.

The statement navigator provides several key tools to help you browse company filings:

We provide 3 main financial statements as standard. The Income Statement, Balance Sheet and Cash Flow Statement. The statement type toggle can be used to switch between the statement types.

While we do our utmost to provide complete coverage of all companies (with up to 10 annual/interim reporting periods depending on the subscription level) we cannot guarantee coverage of all companies. For example, some companies do not report cashflow statements, or they may not be made publicly available on some over the counter exchanges.

At the very least, there will always be at least one annual Income Statement and Balance Sheet for every company in the standardised database. The annual cashflow statements and interim financials are not always available. That said, for developed markets such as the UK/Europe or the US, such cases are very rare.

This switches the view to the type of reporting period, specifically, either to Annual or Interim periods. Annual periods tend to run for a full year, while interim periods may be 6 monthly or quarterly depending on the typical reporting standards of the territory in question. The USA has quarterly reporting, while the UK and other countries (generally) favour semi-annual reporting.

We publish all financial statements for each company in a single currency - the Most Recent Reporting Currency. Therefore a company that has reported in GBP throughout its history will have all of its statements published in GBP on Stockopedia. But if, for example, a company changes its currency from French Francs to the Euro at some point, then all its historic financials are converted into Euro to ensure comparability.

In each period where a translation happens, the reporting currency, published currency and the conversion rate are provided in a tooltip. The conversion rate is based on the exchange rate of the most recent period with the old (in above example, French Franc) currency.

Financial values in Standardised Financials are always converted to Millions, except for per share values.

Each annual or interim filing period is published with a header segment that contains the following key information:

This is the date at which a fiscal period is considered to have ended for a company. This tends to be the same date each year (or quarter) for each company, though companies do occasionally change their fiscal year-end.

Each financial period is associated with a period length, expressed in months or weeks, depending on the company’s reporting practices. It is typical for an annual period to be 12 months, interim periods 6 months and quarterly periods 3 months.

NB: When companies make year-end changes, companies may have unusual reporting period lengths, and very occasionally may report overlapping financial periods. While we do everything in our power to smooth these issues out in our heading financial ratios we cannot always account for every nuance of company reporting. Caveat Emptor !

Statements are sourced from various entities, including regulatory bodies such as the SEC, The London Stock Exchange’s RNS, company web sites and other direct sources, as well as third party providers of source documents.

On all filing headers we publish the Source and the Source Date. The Source Date is the the original announcement date of the source document.

From IFRS to US GAAP, companies from different parts of the world use a variety of accounting standards. We provide a code and definition of the relevant accounting standard used at the top of each filing header.

Companies normally announce their results in a pair of announcements.

At first, Preliminary Statements are announced in press releases or via company websites. These update the market quickly after a reporting period has closed.

A few weeks later, the ’Final Statements’ are derived from the audited documents which are filed by the company with regulators or exchanges. These statements often (but not always) contain updates and changes from the preliminary results, and are generally more detailed (see ‘complete statements’ below). They are not expected to be changed by the company again.

We provide a status flag to show whether each filing is considered final (unlikely to change) or preliminary (likely to change).

We use the concept of Complete and Partial Financial Statements.

A statement is considered complete if the reporting company reports a specific core set of data points for that Statement. Company documents filed with exchanges and/or regulators will have sufficient information to be marked Complete. A Statement is considered Partial or Incomplete if any one of these core data items is missing.

We provide a red flag to indicate whether a given Statement is incomplete. Incomplete statements are often, but not always, preliminary (from press releases).

A company can submit an original update to their financials, a reclassification or a restatement. When updating a company’s information Refinitiv's Data Analysts have to choose from one of these three update options:

i. Normal Update - the data is updated from the original financial report for for the first time.

ii. Reclassification – this can occur when, for instance the company’s auditor or accounting department discover that an item such as cost of revenue or accounts payable has been classified incorrectly. As such they will restate the accounts for the year in which there was a classification error. Reclassifications will generally change the breakdown within the major number, but leave the bottom line numbers, such as Net Income, Total Assets or Total Change in Cash unchanged.

iii. Restatement – this can occur, when for instance, there is a change in the company’s accounting policies or when there were errors in reporting procedures in previously reported financials. Restatements generally result in a change in the bottom line numbers - revenues, net income, total assets, net change in cash, etc.