Access financial statements in EDGAR filings

Every publicly listed company on any US stock exchange is required to publish financial statements in quarterly intervals. Financial statements are included in SEC filing 10-Q, 10-K, 20-F, 40-F, 8-K and 6-K. All publicly listed companies are registered with the SEC and publish their financial information on EDGAR - the information system operated by the SEC. All financial information about such companies, whether displayed on websites or in stock broker research tools, are extracted from the SEC filings listed above.

Our APIs give access to all financial data coming directly from the original source, i.e. the SEC filings published by the companies themselves.

The different types of statements are:

  • Income Statement (Statement of Operations)
  • Balance Sheet
  • Statements of Cash Flow
  • Statements of Stockholder's Equity

Three options exist to access historical financial data of a company. The options are listed below.

1. Access financial statements in XML/XBRL format

This option is suitable for use cases requiring access to machine-readable financial data in XML format. The XML data is structured in XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) and includes all US-GAAP and NON-GAAP items.

XBRL-formatted financial statements are accessible with the XBRL Converter API. Quarterly and annual income statements reported by every public company is accessible. Search financial data by ticker, company name, CIK and find quarterly revenue numbers, gross margins and net earnings for over 3,000 securities.

2. Access financial statements in Excel

This option is suitable for users who want to download and import financial statements from SEC filings into Excel. Every 10-Q and 10-K filing is published with an additional Excel file that includes all financial information of the filing. This Excel file can be downloaded.

Accessing the file requires knowledge of the accession number of the 10-K or 10-Q filing and the CIK of the company or filer. Both attributes can be found with the Filing Search API. For example, the latest 10-Q filings show the accession numbers and CIKs for every filing.

Once the accessionNo and the cik properties are known, the link to the Excel file can be constructed as follows:

  • Remove all hyphens "-" in accessionNo, e.g. 0001564590-20-043288 becomes 000156459020043288.
  • Replace <cik> and <LinkccessionNo> in the link skeleton to get the final link to the Excel file.
    Link skeleton: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/<cik>/<LinkccessionNo>/Financial_Report.xlsx

Here is an example of the downloadable financial statements filed by Bigcommerce (BIGC): https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1626450/000156459020043288/Financial_Report.xlsx

3. Access financial statements in HTML format

Every annual 10-K and quarterly 10-Q report is published with additional HTML files that include the separate financial statements in different files. This option is suitable for users who want to display all or just selected financial statements on a website or want to extract financial information from HTML. It requires the accession number of the 10-K or 10-Q filing and the CIK of the filer in order to build the URLs pointing to each financial statement, for example the income statement of a filing.

Here are the steps to build the URL to a statement: