Blog · Finance metrics and formulas · Finance and FP&A teams
Find US public-company statements in SEC filings and identify the right reporting periods. Build a consistent comparison from downloaded income statement, balance sheet and cash flow figures, then check the totals.
Public company financial statements are available in SEC filings, with annual statements in Form 10-K and interim statements in Form 10-Q for US domestic reporting companies. Find the company, download the complete report, and preserve the period labels and notes before comparing the numbers. For a finance or procurement team, the useful result is a consistent business comparison with a clear source for every line.
Search the SEC's EDGAR company filings using the company's legal name or ticker. Confirm the entity before downloading anything: a parent, a financing subsidiary and a business with a similar name can be different reporting companies. The SEC's EDGAR guide explains company searches and filing types, including the /A suffix used for amendments.
Use this order:
An amendment does not necessarily replace every financial table. Read its stated purpose rather than assuming it supplies a complete new statement set.
Company investor relations pages are another useful route to reports. If a downloaded workbook and the filed statement differ, return to the filing and identify the reason before using the workbook in a comparison.
For US domestic reporting companies, the annual 10-K contains audited financial statements. The 10-Q contains unaudited interim statements and is filed for the first three fiscal quarters; the annual report follows the fourth quarter, as the SEC's public-company overview explains.
In the 10-K, look for Item 8, Financial Statements and Supplementary Data. Read the notes alongside the tables, and use Management's Discussion and Analysis for management's explanation of the movements. The SEC's guide to reading a 10-K describes these sections and the difference between a filing and a shareholder annual report.
The statements answer different questions:
| Statement | Period meaning | Comparison job |
|---|---|---|
| Income statement | Activity over a stated period | Revenue, costs and profit movement |
| Balance sheet | Position at a particular date | Resources, obligations and equity |
| Cash flow statement | Cash movements over a stated period | Operating cash generation and funding uses |
Compare annual activity with annual activity. For partial-year comparisons, use the matching prior-year duration and consult interim financial statements for the seasonality checks. A balance sheet date belongs in its own date column, even when it appears next to activity covering several months.
Keep the original statement labels in your source worksheet. In the comparison sheet, use one line per measure, with the prior period in column B and the current period in column C. Record currency, reporting units, consolidation scope and source reference separately.
If the filing reports amounts in thousands, convert all monetary rows to dollars before combining them with a dollar-based export. Apply the same conversion to every monetary input; leave percentages unchanged. Preserve parentheses as negative amounts in cash flow lines.
Here is an illustrative US distributor, Harbor Industrial, with fiscal years ending December 31. These are selected statement lines, not a complete statement set. All amounts have already been converted to USD.
| Statement line | FY2024 (USD) | FY2025 (USD) |
|---|---|---|
| Revenue | 80,000,000 | 90,000,000 |
| Cost of goods sold | 52,000,000 | 60,300,000 |
| Gross profit | 28,000,000 | 29,700,000 |
| Operating expenses | 20,000,000 | 21,600,000 |
| Operating income | 8,000,000 | 8,100,000 |
| Total assets | 60,000,000 | 66,000,000 |
| Total liabilities | 36,000,000 | 39,600,000 |
| Total equity | 24,000,000 | 26,400,000 |
| Beginning cash | 4,000,000 | 5,400,000 |
| Operating cash flow | 6,400,000 | 7,200,000 |
| Investing cash flow | -4,000,000 | -5,000,000 |
| Financing cash flow | -1,000,000 | -1,500,000 |
| Ending cash | 5,400,000 | 6,100,000 |
For this example, there are no exchange-rate effects or other cash reconciliation items. In an actual filing, retain every line needed to reconcile the reported cash definition.
With the table header in row 1, revenue is row 2, gross profit row 4 and operating income row 6. Enter the following spreadsheet formulas:
Revenue growth: =C2/B2-1
Prior gross margin: =B4/B2
Current gross margin: =C4/C2
Prior operating margin: =B6/B2
Current operating margin: =C6/C2
Revenue increased by $10,000,000: $90,000,000 minus $80,000,000. Dividing that increase by prior revenue gives 12.5% growth. Gross margin moved from 35.0% to 33.0%, a decrease of 2.0 percentage points; operating margin moved from 10.0% to 9.0%, down 1.0 percentage point. Percentages are shown to one decimal place.
Sales grew, but more of each sales dollar went into cost of goods sold. That finding supports a question about purchasing costs, pricing or sales mix. It does not identify which cause applies; the notes and management discussion provide context to investigate.
Run these current-year checks, each of which must return zero:
Gross profit check: =C2-C3-C4
Operating income check: =C4-C5-C6
Balance sheet check: =C7-C8-C9
Cash movement check: =C10+SUM(C11:C13)-C14
The balance sheet ties because $66,000,000 equals $39,600,000 plus $26,400,000. Cash ties because $5,400,000 plus $7,200,000 minus $5,000,000 minus $1,500,000 equals $6,100,000. Repeat the checks for the prior period. For additional measures, use the definitions in financial KPIs consistently across both years.
Upload your downloaded statement workbook or Google Sheet after confirming its periods, units and source references; Covirage maps the columns, and its tools compute changes, margins and arithmetic checks. The external AI model explains the results, with every figure traced to its rows. Create a free Covirage account and bring a sample of your own export.
See Covirage for finance teams for the wider reporting workflow.
Yes. EDGAR provides public access to SEC filings without a subscription. Company investor relations pages also often provide annual and quarterly reports. Start with the filed report and its notes so that a presentation or earnings release does not become your only source.
Sometimes a company uses its 10-K as its shareholder annual report. In other cases, the shareholder report is a separate publication. Check the document itself and use the filed 10-K when you need the complete annual financial statements and accompanying disclosures.
You can discuss them together, but direct growth comparisons need matching durations. Compare a quarter with the corresponding prior-year quarter, or a full year with another full year. Confirm whether an interim cash flow statement covers the quarter or the year to date.
No. Accessing a filed report establishes where the figures came from. Recalculating totals can reveal extraction mistakes, but it does not independently validate the underlying accounting. Read the notes and any accompanying accountant's report before deciding how to use the information.