Sources for Structured Historical US Company Financial Statements
Summary
The document collects possible sources for machine-readable historical quarterly financial statements for US companies, with a focus on lower-cost access and broad historical coverage. It identifies SEC EDGAR filings and XBRL data as free starting points, noting that older filings may require parsing. It also mentions Capital IQ as a more convenient paid option, and names Quandl, Mergent, and Intrinio as other providers of SEC or company fundamentals data.
The answers describe different tradeoffs rather than compare vendors systematically. Provider coverage, formats, pricing, access limits, and historical depth can vary; the listed details reflect the answers’ time and are not independently assessed. One response gives an example of retrieving a standardized quarterly statement from Intrinio and reports a daily API call allowance, while another distinguishes as-reported from standardized statements. Researchers should check current availability and definitions before building a dataset, especially when survivorship and historical company coverage matter.
Key ideas
- SEC EDGAR and XBRL provide free access to structured company filing data.
- Older filings may need parsing before they can be used in a machine-readable dataset.
- Commercial services can simplify access and may provide standardized historical financial statements.
- The listed sources differ in cost, formats, access limits, and coverage, so suitability depends on the research need.
- Vendor details in the answers may have changed since they were posted.
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Full text
# Free/cheap source of structured historical quarterly filings? # Free/cheap source of structured historical quarterly filings? What is a good place to acquire cheap/free historical quarterly filings data for US Companies? Specifically, I'm interested in the consolidated financial statements. The data should be well-structured and machine-readable (csv,tsv,json, etc.) I'm familiar with CompuStat and CRSP but both are well out of my price range. Coverage need not be exhaustive, but most of the Russell 3000 (with dead companies) for the last 5-10 years would be great. ## Answer by glyphard (score 7, accepted) https://quant.stackexchange.com/a/568 You can get quite a bit of structured data for free from the SEC's Edgar system via XML: http://www.sec.gov/edgar/quickedgar.htm http://xbrl.sec.gov/ Even the older stuff that's not xml based, is fairly readily parsable. Another source that is easier to deal with, but not free, and possibly expensive, is CapitalIQ (where Yahoo Finance gets their data from). ## Answer by jandersen (score 2) https://quant.stackexchange.com/a/24586 I see the question and answers are rather old here but I just ran across quandl which provides access to a variety of SEC data with a free API key. ## Answer by Eugene Osovetsky (score 0) https://quant.stackexchange.com/a/1317 Take a look at http://www.mergent.com/servius - specifically the Company Fundamentals API - this has historical quarterly financial statements, both in an as-reported and standardized form. (Disclosure: The API is managed by my company) ## Answer by Andrew Carpenter (score 0) https://quant.stackexchange.com/a/34526 Intrinio provides that data in JSON and CSV. Its free, up to 500 daily API calls: https://intrinio.com/data/company-financials For example, if you want to pull YUMs income_statement from Q2 2015: ``` https://api.intrinio.com/financials/standardized?identifier=YUM&statement=income_statement&fiscal_period=Q2&fiscal_year=2015 ``` Obviously you can get any statement (income, balance, cashflows), for any public US company, going back about 10 years this way. You just need to adjust the parameters.
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