Friday 18 November 2011

Accessing SEC XBRL spreadsheets directly

As I mentioned in a previous post - Seeing XBRL for free, you can circumnavigate the SEC viewer and go directly to a pre-canned spreadsheet of the entire filing!

Here's the specifics of how to do it:

Use a URL with the following format:

     http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/[CIK]/[Accession No]/Financial_Report.xls

where [CIK] and [Accession No] are the unique filer and filing identifiers you need to insert which can be found by doing an Edgar search or in an RSS feed of Edgar filings. The Accession Number must be a fixed length of 18 digits so must include any leading zero's. The opposite is true for the CIK - variable length and no leading zero's.

So if you wanted the 2011 Apple 10-K in Excel you would create the following link. Click on it and it will download.

http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/320193/000119312511282113/Financial_Report.xls


2 comments:

  1. thanks for the info! Is it possible to get the XBRL from the web directly? I want it in ascii format, like an xml sheet would be. My end goal is to parse the xbrl with python. I figured xbrl format would be easier than the xls format for working with python, but I can only seem to download xls format. I see you have other posts about xbrl viewers, I'd prefer not to have to deal with a viewer. Unless it can interface with python easily.
    Again, thanks for blogging about this, helpful!

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    Replies
    1. duh, its in the base url you posted as a zip file
      http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/320193/000119312511282113/

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