Which source of Company Financial Data should I use for my model?

If we want to create a model of a company's future performance, we need a starting point, a set of inputs which we can examine, adjust and extrapolate our best estimate of how we anticipate the company will perform in the future.

So what are our choices?

1. Lifting values straight from the Financial Reports filed by a company
2. Data Vendor - Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters, Capital IQ, FactSet etc
3. XBRL

I believe XBRL provides the best possible place to start. Why?

Well, as my old Physics teacher was never short of telling us, lets go back to first principles.

Our ideal starting point would be a perfectly accurate picture of how a company is performing right now. We can’t get this however for two reasons:

1. We don’t have real time access to companies accounting systems so we are constrained behind the curve by the reporting calendar.
2. We can only see the published external numbers, the numbers that the company allows us to see, subject of course to any legal disclosure requirements or the opinion of their auditors.

So even this, our best source, is inherently flawed, so we must be ready at all times to make adjustments/correct the figures put in front of us. Despite these caveats, the company still has to be our first port of call because only they have the closest and best view of the current operating performance.

So why would we use a data vendor?

Well their starting point is exactly the same but what they do is prepare the accounts for financial analysis. If you start from the Financial Reports filed by a company, preparing every single company this way is expensive, which is why they will charge you thousands of dollars for the privilege. Criticisms levelled at data vendors in the past have been that they don’t always get the figures right and that its not always clear how and what adjustments have been made.

Also a standardised approach can be problematic as the Corporate Finance Institute note:

“Companies such as Bloomberg, Capital IQ, and Thompson Reuters provide powerful databases of financial data. However, financial statements retrieved from these databases tend to be in a standardized format. Thus, if the company uses an accounting value unique to its business operations, you will not grasp it from data retrieved and it will affect your analysis.”

This is why in critical decision making, when an investment decision or M&A deal could be worth millions of dollars, vendor data would never be used as a starting point for a single entity centric model. Of course this data has value in screening and modelling whole markets or sectors but even here, for the reasons stated, they are potentially flawed inputs.

So what does XBRL bring to the party?

XBRL takes the effort out of lifting the financial values from the report and provides a first pass at standardization. Not normalization mind, but a first step in that process if your goal is vertical analysis against a company’s peers. As I discuss in this article, unfettered XBRL, as filed with the SEC and made available through Edgar or alternatively for a fee via the XBRL.US API, does not, nor indeed intend to, provide a perfect set of standardized values.

By harnessing the XBRL tagging, your models can be automatically derived from genuinely as reported values, the closest view of past operating performance direct from the company and untampered by any third parties. The hard graft of lifting values, monotonous, error prone and time consuming, is removed. But as I underlined above, this is not quite the finishing point. Most of the hard work is done but we must always be ready and prepared to make a few adjustments*. They will undoubtedly be required.

*How you can easily make these adjustments is discussed here and in the following video. If you want to read more about the need for adjustments in XBRL, then check out the next post in this series.

You can also read about totaliZd from Fundamental X here, our complete solution for preparing XBRL derived inputs to financial models in Excel.

Getting XBRL in Excel is dead easy with Power Query...

Constructing a web query in Excel using Microsoft's new wonder query engine to access XBRL is really simple.

Starting with Excel 2010, Microsoft started peddling a new analytical add-in designed to bring data of any shape, size and colour into Excel in one big mashup. An analysts dream.

In Excel 2016 and Office 365, it became part of the fabric and got a new name - Get & Transform; Microsoft's chosen way to source data from within and without Excel. So much so that the way we used to, well still do, run web queries at XBRL XL to pull in XBRL is now described as a "legacy data import".

The web query is dead. Long live the web query! Yep web queries are still a vital part of the mashup and are immediately accessible from the Get & Transform area of the Data Ribbon.

I have to say, having spent the last 6 months, pulling it and tangling with it, its still a bit ropy round the edges. There are bugs and you can do the same things in confusingly different places. It doesn't all quite fit together but it will do and when it does its going to be epic.

So we've started to play with it. And you can see the results in this video.

We designed our XBRL data to be accessible by the most universal route possible. So you could query our data via the most basic of web protocols to download simple tables.

So a web request to access XBRL from the latest 10-K from Microsoft looks like this:

http://xbrlsheet.xbrlxl.com?tkn=0&eid=msft   (Get a free, more useful token at our website)

And a query to give you precise control of what filing you get back:

http://xbrlsheet.xbrlxl.com?tkn=12345&eid=msft&dat=20170630&fil=1&typ=fsn

fil=1 brings back a 10-Q, fil=4, 10-K. typ=fsn brings back the financial statements & notes.

So if you choose Get Data/From Web from the Data Ribbon and insert one of the above web requests (with a token that works rather than the placeholders above - tkn=0 works but its a groundhog - same filing keeps coming back), it will go away and bring back four tables. If you select Table 3 and press load you will instantly have a spreadsheet full of XBRL financials just as the company reported them.

As it comes with the tags, you can do lookups to pick up precisely whatever values you want to include in your models. You can see these at work here in our Power Query version of the X Sheet.

Of course to get a different filing all you have to do is use a different company ticker. Except how do you do that in the Power Query we've just built? Well you could run through the whole rigmarole again and build another Power Query, putting a different ticker in the web request, and as we saw that's relatively painless. But there's got to be a better way, right? A way to take control of the query? Well there is but it is less than straight forward and you'll need a whole new tool set.

In the meantime, you can use one we prepared earlier, The X Sheet . When we come back, we will show you how you do it. Till then we suggest you brush up on your knowledge of Excel Tables!

So now you can see exactly how to take control of an XBRL Power Query in the next post...