Monday 24 September 2012

And Finally: Quarterlies. Accessing Quarterly XBRL in Excel

A bit later than planned but finally you can now select XBRL 10Q filing data in XBRL to XL and analyse it in Excel.

I have created a new template for quarterly data, which automatically gets selected for download if the 1st filing you choose is a 10Q. This has been designed to make the most of both the values for the most recent quarter and the Year To Date (YTD) numbers.

In a quarterly report, a company will in effect report 5 periods worth of data: latest & previous quarter; latest YTD & previous YTD and comparable balance sheet numbers for the start of the year to which the quarter belongs. In the 1st quarter 10Q, the YTD's won't appear.

So in an XBRL quarterly filing, there are in theory up to 5 principal periods but XBRL has two types of concept (or context to use the XBRL parlance) for any given period: one for duration elements (e.g. income statement items) and one for instant elements (e.g. balance sheet items) so that might lead you to think that a quarterly filing has 10 of these things, except that it doesn't because a quarter and a corresponding YTD share the same instant balance sheet date.

This makes lining up periods for comparison tricky. especially the latest YTD which shares the same balance sheet numbers as the quarter. In XBRL to XL, we have duplicated these numbers to create fully comparable columns of data, regardless of whether you are looking at quarter or YTD figures.


In the "Filing" sheets (above), containing the data laid out as it appears in the filed document, 5 columns of data are downloaded: latest & previous quarter; start of year balance sheet; latest & previous YTD. Be aware that generally, no comparable balance sheet figures are included for the previous quarter - you will need to include the filing for the previous quarter for that.

And in the "Standard" sheet, we have created a new control allowing you to toggle between the quarter and YTD values.


Set it to true to see the YTD numbers.


"Control" is a rather over blown description for it - it's just a cell in which you type either true or false! And the item value formulas use this to determine which columns to use in the calculation.

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