Online Investing Hacks

Download Financial Statements

Download financial statements to study financial ratios without tedious manual data entry.

To puzzle out how a company has performed in the past and where it might be heading, financial ratios can’t be beat. The problem has always been data entry. Evaluating trends in financial measures requires at least three years of values, but who wants to manually transcribe three years of income statements, balance sheets, and cash flow statements into a spreadsheet? Sure, financial data providers offer data files of financial information—with a price tag attached [Hack #20] . And, you can always use Excel web queries to grab data from web pages [Hack #7] . However, EdgarScan (http://edgarscan.pwcglobal.com) provides the key information from financial statements, extracted from the filings that the company submits to the SEC, already stored in Excel spreadsheets that you can download at no charge.

The Global Technology Centre at Price Waterhouse Coopers developed EdgarScan, and it’s a mother lode of data for investors who dig deep into financial ratios. EdgarScan spreadsheet files contain up to thirteen years of financial statements (both annual and quarterly) for companies. If a company has been in business less than thirteen years, it provides the data that is available.

Tip

Financial statements can be quite complex. EdgarScan aggregates some numbers into higher-level categories. If EdgarScan data doesn’t contain the measures you need, use other sources for ...