Tuesday, March 24, 2026

Calcbench is always striving to provide more data to our subscribers, so you can put that data to good use driving better financial analysis.

To that end, today we kick off a short series of posts on new tax payment disclosures that companies are now making: what that data is, what it tells you about corporate financial performance, and how you can find it in Calcbench. 

This is the same dataset Calcbench provided to The Wall Street Journal for its March 20 story about corporate cash taxes paid.

Our tale begins in 2023, when accounting rule-makers adopted a new standard formally known as ASU 2023-09, Improvements to Income Tax Disclosures. The standard requires companies to report the actual taxes they pay to different jurisdictions around the world, so long as those individual amounts are at least 5 percent of total taxes the company pays that fiscal year. 

For most companies, ASU 2023-09 went into effect with their 2025 fiscal years, which means we’re seeing these new tax disclosures for the first time ever in the annual reports arriving this spring — and yes, Calcbench has all the data, indexed and cleaned and ready for you!

Where This Data Exists

Companies will typically report this breakdown of taxes paid as part of the Income Taxes footnote they file along with their financial statements. Calcbench subscribers can find that footnote by (a) looking up a company on our Disclosures & Footnotes Query page and calling up its most recent financial filing; and then (b) selecting the Income Tax footnote from the list of choices on the left side of your screen.1


For example, we looked up IBM’s ($IBM) tax disclosures from its 2025 annual report, filed on Feb. 24. IBM’s tax footnote runs fairly long, but at the very bottom was this neat table listing taxes paid around the world in 2025:


Not every filer will have a disclosure that looks exactly like this, of course. Different companies will have operations in different parts of the world, and some might have very few jurisdiction-specific disclosures if those amounts don’t exceed 5 percent of the company’s total tax bill. But if a company is filing disaggregated tax disclosures under ASU 2023-09, Calcbench has that information ready to go. 

(Most companies will also report their adoption of ASU 2023-09 in their Summary of Significant Accounting Policies footnote, also readily available on our Disclosures & Footnotes Query page; although that disclosure is usually more about a new standard’s broad implications for the company and won’t necessarily include specific, data-driven numbers.) 

You can also find these disclosures via our Multi-Company page, for either one company or groups of companies. Just choose the companies you want to research, and then you can select any of various tax disclosures we provide in the standardized metrics field on the left side of your screen. See below.


Select the disclosure you want, and it appears on your screen! That’s all there is to it.

What the Data Tells You

Historically, most readers of financial statements are used to seeing tax data in the income statement, where it appears as an accrued expense charged against revenue — but thanks to the legendarily complicated U.S. tax code, the tax expense a company reports for a fiscal year isn’t always the same amount as the actual taxes paid in that fiscal year. (Sometimes adjustments between tax expense and actual taxes paid will be reported as “deferred income taxes” in the statement of cash flows as part of operating activities.) 

ASU 2023-09 drills into those actual taxes paid by a company. Moreover, a company doesn’t just report the dollar amount of taxes paid. It must also report where it paid those taxes, by country and by federal, state, and local level — which provides financial analysts with a wealth of new information. 

The standard also requires companies to disclose a “rate reconciliation” every year regardless of materiality in the following categories:

  • State and local income tax

  • Net of federal income tax effect

  • Foreign tax effects 

  • Effect of changes in tax laws or rates enacted in the current period

  • Effect of cross-border tax laws

  • Tax credits

  • Changes in valuation allowances

  • Nontaxable or nondeductible items 

  • Changes in unrecognized tax benefits


What does all that look like in practice? Again, let’s look at IBM’s disclosure.



Altogether, these disclosures can help financial analysts uncover all sorts of interesting insights. For example, you can see which countries are collecting significant tax revenue from U.S. filers, or which individual U.S. filers are contributing the most to specific countries’ tax revenue. You can also see how much money foreign businesses, listed on U.S. exchanges, are paying in taxes here (since those amounts would qualify as “foreign” taxes for those non-U.S. domiciled businesses).


Calcbench will offer more examples in future posts of how to put all this information to work. For now, just know that fresh data is available and Calcbench has it ready for you!

1 There are some firms that provide this data in Supplemental Cash Flow disclosures.

Friday, March 20, 2026

Calcbench was feeling a bit peckish this week for insights into the macro-economic environment, so how better to pass the time then sifting through the earnings releases from restaurants to see what they had to say about inflation? 

Various restaurant chains offer inflation forecasts as part of their earnings guidance. A good example of this is Darden Restaurants ($DRI). Last summer, at the end of its fiscal 2025, the company had forecast inflation for its upcoming fiscal year at 2.5 to 3 percent. By the end of its fiscal Q1 2026 in September, Darden nudged the forecast upward to 3 to 3.5 percent.


Darden filed its latest earnings release this week, for its fiscal Q3 2026. It now forecasts inflation at 3.5 percent. 


That led us to look for other disclosures at other restaurants. Sure enough, we found them.


Texas Roadhouse ($TXRH) included inflation estimates in its 2025 full-year earnings release filed on Feb. 19. The company predicts wage and labor inflation costs of 3 to 4 percent, and commodity inflation costs at an eye-popping 7 percent!


Analysts can take those numbers and do some preliminary modeling. Figure 1, below, shows Texas Roadhouse’s costs as reported on the 2025 income statement. Food and beverage costs were $2.05 billion, labor costs $1.94 billion.



If the company’s inflation forecasts prove true, that would imply 2026 food and beverage costs of $2.19 billion and labor costs of $2.01 billion — a total increase of $211.5 million. That amount would shave 44 percent off Texas Roadhouse’s operating income, which was $474.7 million for the year.


Of course Texas Roadhouse’s actual 2026 performance will hinge on other factors too, but if those inflation predictions prove true then there’s no denying they will be a significant squeeze on earnings that the company will have to address somehow: higher prices, efficiency programs, or some mix of the two — and that was all before war in Iran sent fuel and fertilizer costs soaring. Model accordingly.


One could run the same sort of analysis on Bloomin Brands ($BLMN). In its 2025 earnings release from Feb. 25, the parent company of Outback Steakhouse and other brands said it expects commodity inflation of 4.5 to 5.5 percent and labor inflation of 3 to 3.5 percent in the coming year. 


Figure 2, below, shows that Bloomin had $1.18 billion food costs and $1.24 billion in labor costs for 2025. Adjust those numbers upward according to Bloomin’s inflation estimates, and you arrive at an increase of $99.1 million for 2026, which is more than twice the company’s 2025 operating income of $37.1 million. So again, even if these inflation estimates are only somewhat accurate, that’s a big threat to earnings that Bloomin will have to address somehow.



Alas, not many other restaurant businesses do offer inflation estimates in their guidance, but perhaps that’s important to know too. From the few examples we found, inflation is clearly a potent threat to earnings. Just because other restaurant businesses don’t provide inflation estimates, that doesn’t make the threat go away.


Food for thought as you prepare for Q1 2026 earnings and questions you want to ask the CFO on that next earnings call.

Tuesday, March 17, 2026

The 2025 earnings season is now over, which means the 2025 proxy season is about to begin. For those analysts and institutional investors who enjoy sifting through proxy data, let’s do a quick review of the data Calcbench can bring to your fingertips.

For starters, you can find proxy statements for the companies you follow on our Disclosures and Footnotes Query page. Simply go to the pull-down menu on the left side of your screen, select “Proxy” from the list of choices, and the document appears. See Figure 1, below, for an example featuring Boeing ($BA).



What’s in the Proxy?

Proxy statements are most famous for their data about executive compensation. This is where you can see how much a company’s top executives were paid, broken down by salary, bonus, stock awards, perks, “other” compensation, and the like. Typically a company discloses compensation for the CEO, CFO, and several other “named executive officers,” or NEOs.


Because these disclosures are tagged, Calcbench users can also find them in quick table form for one or more companies via our Multi-Company page. 


For example, Figure 2, below, shows total compensation for the CEO, CFO, and even the board of directors (yes, we track that too) for several large firms that have already filed their 2025 proxies.



You can also look at compensation trends over time with a simple time-series pull, by clicking on that small clock icon you see at the top of the column of data you’ve pulled. 


The chart below shows trends in average CEO and CFO total compensation for the S&P 500 for 2020 through 2024. (We excluded 2025 because not enough companies have filed their 2025 proxies yet for apples-to-apples comparison.) 



Surprising exactly nobody, CEOs are paid more handsomely than CFOs; although it’s interesting to see the surge in total compensation in 2021, followed by a dip in 2022. Presumably that’s because a significant amount of CEOs’ total compensation comes from equity grants, the value of which can fluctuate with the stock market. 

Other Compensation and Proxy Data

Proxy statements are also famous for disclosures about audit fees. Specifically, companies report:


  • Audit fees;

  • “Audit-related” fees;

  • Tax-related fees; and

  • Other audit fees.


Again, you can find those disclosures by searching either the proxy statement itself on our Disclosures & Footnotes Query page or the Multi-Company page (where you can search many companies at once and export all the data into Excel). 


Subscribers can also research new pay versus performance disclosures that became mandatory last year; we had a whole post on the issue last fall researching how to find and study those numbers. And don’t forget our interview with financial analyst and adviser Stephen O’Byrne last year, who walked through how analysts can study executive compensation data. 


O’Byrne even contributed a guest post comparing the compensation incentives for the CEOs at Pfizer ($PFE) and Verizon ($VZ), where he concluded that Verizon’s CEO had less incentive to support the share price — and shortly thereafter, Verizon changed CEOs. 


So yes, you can indeed gain a lot of insight by studying proxy statement data; and as always, Calcbench has that data in spades.
Thursday, March 12, 2026
Oracle's AI Footprint Just Got Bigger — Calcbench Signal
Remaining Performance Obligation
~$550B
Q3 FY2026 — up from ~$130B at Y FY2025
Off Balance Sheet Lease Commitments
~$260B
Q3 FY2026 — up from ~$45B at Y FY2025

Back in November, we wrote about Oracle's ($ORCL) AI exposure — specifically its off-balance-sheet lease commitments, which had ballooned to roughly $100 billion as of August 2025, up from a mere $411 million in 2020. That's not a typo. That's a 24,822 percent increase in five years.

Then in December, we flagged that Oracle had leapt to the top of the S&P 500 for year-over-year growth in Remaining Performance Obligations — a 359 percent increase, from $99.1 billion to $455.3 billion, the single largest jump among 151 firms we tracked.

Now it's March, and Oracle just filed its fiscal Q3 2026 results. Spoiler: both of those numbers have gotten even bigger.

The two charts below tell the story. We pulled them directly from Oracle's disclosures using Calcbench — the kind of analysis any subscriber can run in minutes.

ORCL · NYSE · Calcbench Data
Remaining Performance Obligation
USD billions
PeriodRPO (USD)
Off Balance Sheet Lease Commitments
USD billions
PeriodCommitments (USD)
Source: Calcbench · Generated March 12, 2026
* Periods reflect Oracle's fiscal calendar. ORCL's fiscal year ends May 31 — fiscal quarters do not correspond directly to calendar quarters.

What to Watch Next

Oracle is now, unambiguously, one of the largest AI infrastructure bets in the market. The question analysts should be asking isn't whether the demand is real — the RPO chart pretty clearly shows that contracts are being signed. The question is whether Oracle can actually deliver on $550 billion in performance obligations while simultaneously managing $262 billion in off-balance-sheet lease commitments and the capital expenditures required to bring those data centers online.

We looked at this capex question briefly in our February post on AI hyperscaler spending, where we noted that Oracle's capex spending was soaring even as operating cash flow struggled to keep pace. Unlike Amazon or Google, Oracle is entering capital-intensive territory for the first time. The company's comfort zone has always been software licensing and database contracts — high-margin, low-capital businesses. What it's doing now is something altogether different.

You can track all of it in Calcbench — RPO, off-balance-sheet commitments, capex, operating cash flow, free cash flow, debt levels. Use our Multi-Company page, our Disclosures & Footnotes Query, or our API if you'd rather pipe the data directly into your own model.

The numbers are there. They're updated in minutes. And in Oracle's case, they are absolutely worth watching.

For more information or to start a free two-week trial of Calcbench Premium, email us at us@calcbench.com.

Tuesday, March 10, 2026

Last week the CEO of United Airlines ($UAL) warned that the war in Iran and the subsequent soaring price of oil and jet fuel will have a “meaningful” impact on the company’s financial performance this quarter. 


How meaningful, exactly? That’s for financial analysts to model on their own — but Calcbench does have multiple data feeds on airline fuel costs that can help analysts build those models and evaluate what might happen next.


For starters, we have an airlines industry template that tracks all the standard non-GAAP financial disclosures that airlines make. Those disclosures include fuel consumed (in gallons), average price per gallon for the period, and cost per available seat mile — all of which are heavily influenced by the cost of fuel. 


You can download our airlines template from DropBox, although the template won’t work automatically unless you (a) are a Calcbench professional subscriber; and (b) have our Excel Add-In already installed. If you need help with either of those things, email us at us@calcbench.com any time. 


Analysts can also use our Company-in-Detail page or Multi-Company page to look up information from specific airlines to see what disclosures they’ve made in recent periods and what stories arise from those numbers. 


For example, we used the Multi-Company page to pull up total fuel costs and operating expenses for six major U.S. airlines, and then calculated fuel as a percentage of total operating costs for the last five years. The result is Figure 1, below.


As you can see, fuel costs were a huge part of all operating expenses in 2022, which was the last time recently that oil traded at $100 per barrel (due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine). Oil prices slowly trended downward since then, and fuel costs fell as a portion of airlines’ overall operating costs to the 25 to 35 percent levels seen recently.


Company-by-Company Examination


You can also use our Company-in-Detail page to look at an individual airline’s financial statements and get a sense of how fuel costs have changed over time. For example, Figure 2, below, shows United’s income statement for the last several years, with the fuel expense line shaded grey. 



Notice that fuel costs fell from $13.1 billion in 2022 to $11.4 billion in 2025, and went from 30.7 percent of all operating costs to 21 percent of operating costs across the same period.


Now do some math. In fourth-quarter 2025 United reported total fuel costs of $2.92 billion and an average cost of $2.49. As of last week, jet fuel cost $3.58 per gallon, an increase of 44 percent. If we apply that 44 percent increase to the $2.92 billion United spent last quarter and passenger traffic volume holds steady, it would imply total fuel costs this quarter of $4.2 billion.


To be clear, this is just crude mathematical speculation on our part; we have no idea what United will actually report, since that number depends on a host of factors: how much fuel United already purchased before hostilities broke out, passenger traffic, and more. Our point is only that we have the data that can let analysts run their own models for this sort of forecasting. 


Don’t Forget the Footnotes


As always, analysts can also dig through the footnote disclosures to see what airlines are saying in narrative form about fuel costs, too. For example, we found this item in JetBlue’s ($JBLU) annual report under the footnote about market risk:


Our results of operations are affected by changes in the price and availability of aircraft fuel. Market risk is estimated as a hypothetical 10 percent increase in the December 31, 2025 cost per gallon of fuel. Based on projected 2026 fuel consumption, such an increase would result in an increase to aircraft fuel expense of $200 million in 2026. As of December 31, 2025, we did not have any outstanding fuel hedging contracts.


According to JetBlue’s earnings release from Jan. 27, average fuel cost at the end of 2025 was $2.51. A 10 percent increase from that number would be $2.76 — but as we noted earlier, the market rate for jet fuel at the moment is $3.58, which is 42.6 percent higher than JetBlue’s year-end price. So if these high prices hold, the additional cost to JetBlue will be a lot higher than the $200 million mentioned above.


Other airlines make similar disclosures in their footnotes. Delta Air Lines ($DAL), for example, notes that “a one cent increase in the cost of jet fuel per gallon would result in approximately $40 million of additional annual fuel expense based on annual consumption of approximately four billion gallons of jet fuel.” (Delta goes on to say it has hedging instruments meant to blunt some of those cost pressures.)


Nor should you forget disclosures about hedging instruments. Some airlines use hedges to prevent surprises in fuel costs, others don’t. For example, JetBlue said this in its footnote disclosure about hedging and derivative instruments:



Translation: JetBlue did have hedging instruments to offset fluctuating fuel prices in 2024, but didn’t have any in 2025. We’re not clear what hedges the airline might have in place now, but if the answer is “none” then that’s going to bring pricing pressure to bear at least in this quarter, if not throughout all of 2026.


So if you follow the airlines industry, there is a lot of data out there to help you understand how today’s soaring fuel prices might affect financial performance. You can find them in our databases through Calcbench.com, or through our airline industry template, or via our API to pipe those data feeds directly into your own models. 


Meanwhile, the airlines will start filing their Q1 2026 earnings reports in about one month. (Delta is scheduled to go first with an earnings release on April 8.) Buckle up and brace for turbulence.
Thursday, March 5, 2026

Grocery giant Kroger ($KR) filed its full-year 2025 earnings release this morning, with a rather unpleasant $2.5 billion impairment charge for a warehouse automation project that never delivered on its expected promises.

The impairment charge wasn’t a surprise. Kroger had previously disclosed the matter in a filing on Nov. 18, framing the matter as an “updated e-commerce plan” where Kroger would close three fulfillment warehouses around the United States. The impairment translates to a one-time hit to EPS of $2.91 per diluted share.


Wait a minute, warehouse automation costs… Why does that ring a bell? 


Because Walmart ($WMT) reported its own EPS issues with warehouse automation several weeks ago — but did so in a very different way. Together, the two earnings releases present a fascinating comparison of how large businesses might treat projects and how they disclose issues to investors when said project goes wobbly.


First, Kroger. The company originally struck a partnership in 2018 with British warehouse automation business Ocado to build as many as 20 automated fulfillment centers across the United States. Ultimately only eight such centers ever went live, including the three that Kroger now plans to close per its filing last quarter. Krogers ended up paying Ocado $350 million to get out of the partnership, and taking the $2.5 billion impairment for robotic automation dreams that never came to pass.


By taking an impairment, Kroger ends up reporting that $2.5 billion charge on the statement of cash flows, under the cash from operations disclosures. See Figure 1, below.



On the other hand is Walmart. It has an equity investment in Symbotic ($SYM), a warehouse automation company in suburban Boston. That partnership traces back to 2017, although more recently Walmart sold its own in-house robotics efforts to Symbotic in 2025 and pledged another $520 million to Symbotic in long-term investment.


We’re not robotics specialists here, so we don’t know how good Symbotic’s technology might or might not be; but the company has run at a loss for years. Walmart, as an investor, shoulders some of that loss — but reports it on the income statement rather than the statement of cash flows, in the Other (Gains) Losses line item.


Sure enough, Walmart reported “other losses” of $2.12 billion in Q4. Tucked away at the bottom of Page 33 on its earnings release was a note that “net losses were primarily driven by a decrease in the underlying stock price of our investment in Symbotic.” Those losses resulted in a $0.21 hit to EPS. (Walmart reported $0.53 EPS for the quarter, and adjusted EPS of $0.74.)


So we have Kroger, a grocery business, disentangling itself from a partnership for warehouse automation by declaring an impairment; and Walmart, a general retail business, supporting a warehouse automation tech startup that so far doesn’t turn a profit, and therefore drags down Walmart’s net income.


The things you can learn about corporate strategy just by looking in the footnotes!

Tuesday, March 3, 2026

Provision for Loan Losses as Percentage of Revenue, 2023-2025

Provisions for loan losses (PLL) is a valuable insight into the strength of financial firms' growth prospects. Calcbench allows users to plot PLL as a percentage of revenue over time to see which firms have significant shifts in PLL, which can be a leading indicator of potential lending trouble. The below chart shows PLL as percentage of revenue for 28 financial firms for the last three years. Some firms have two or one dots when the year-over-year percentages are unchanged.

Calcbench subscribers can find this data in several ways. You could use our Multi-Company page to track revenue and PLL for any group of companies you like (although PLL is mostly a disclosure for financial firms) and then ask for a time-series of data for both metrics. You could also configure a template with our Excel Add-In. For Premium subscribers, the data would automatically populate into your Excel template as firms file their latest disclosures.

For more information, email us@calcbench.com any time!
Friday, February 27, 2026

We are just about at the end of Q4 and full-year earnings season, and this Friday have perhaps our last earnings roundup of the season courtesy of the famed Calcbench Earnings Tracker. 


We now have more than 2,000 non-financial firms in our sample, including important late filers such as Walmart ($WMT) and Nvidia ($NVDA), which just filed two days ago. Figure 1, below, shows the change in Q4 2025 numbers from the year-ago period.



Most notably, net income is up 10.2 percent from one year ago, revenue up 8.5 percent. EBIT, operating income, and cash from operations are all up by double-digits too. Cash is up 9.8 percent.


Capex spending is also up an impressive 25.1 percent, which one might assume to mean that companies are spending oodles of cash to invest in long-term growth — but one would be misled! 


As we wrote one week ago, that surge in capex spending is entirely due to four AI hyperscalers pouring staggering sums into building data centers. Strip those four out (Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft) and capex spending among the rest of Corporate America actually fell by 3.4 percent compared to one year ago.


Figure 2, below, is the same information in table format.


Metric 2025 2024 Firms YoY Change
Revenue 4.93T 4.54T 1,942 +8.6%
Cost of Revenue 3.01T 2.69T 1,758 +11.7%
Capex 400B 320B 1,731 +25.1%
OpEx 1.27T 1.19T 1,991 +6.6%
SG&A 677B 629B 1,933 +7.6%
Operating Income 639B 567B 2,168 +12.8%
Net Income 493B 448B 2,026 +10.2%
Assets 30.35T 27.88T 2,187 +8.9%
Cash 1.97T 1.79T 2,162 +9.8%
Total Debt 8.77T 8.16T 1,635 +7.4%

There’s still plenty of financial data to arrive, including rich disclosures in 10-Ks, segment-level analysis, and lots of juicy morsels of insight in the footnotes. Heck, we might even do one or two more earnings roundups too if late filers submit data that changes the picture materially. Whatever the data is, we have it, and you can find it!


Wednesday, February 25, 2026
You may have seen headlines lately that pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk ($NVO) will enact significant price cuts for its blockbuster weight loss drugs Ozempic, Wegovy, and Rybelsus starting in 2027.

Novo Nordisk is cutting prices because it’s facing stiff competition from Eli Lilly &Co. ($LLY) and pressure from government regulators to make the popular drugs more affordable. The cuts will lower the price for a one-month supply to $675, which translates into reductions of from 35 to 50 percent depending on the exact drug. 

For financial analysts, an important question emerges: Just how much money does Novo Nordisk make from these drugs, anyway?

As always, Calcbench can help.

Novo Nordisk is based in Denmark, and as a foreign issuer its annual report is known as a Form 20-F. In that report, however, the company does report the sales of individual drugs just like U.S. pharmaceutical companies do. (We have a pharmaceutical sales template available for Calcbench premium subscribers. Email us at us@calcbench.com for more details.) 

We called up Novo Nordisk’s 2025 annual report in our Disclosures & Footnotes Query page, searched for “Ozempic” and immediately found a neat table listing revenue for that drug and many more, all organized by major geographic segments. From there, we exported the table into Excel (another standard Calcbench power) and arrived at Figure 1, below.


(Novo Nordisk reports its sales numbers in Danish krone; we converted them to U.S. dollars at the current exchange rate of 1 krone = $0.158.)


Then we reconfigured the numbers to total up sales from all three drugs in the United States and the rest of the world to see how dependent those three blockbusters are on the U.S. market. See Figure 2, below.



So even as U.S. sales are still rising, the pace of sales growth is decelerating; while sales in the rest of the world is picking up. U.S. sales only grew 43.3 percent in the last three years; rest of the world sales grew by 89 percent in the same period.

What we don’t know is whether the price cuts entice more U.S. insurance plans to cover the three drugs and therefore lead to higher sales thanks to a low price/high volume strategy. But analysts following Novo Nordisk can build your own models to get better insight into that question. The data is there, and you can pull it out with a few easy keystrokes through Calcbench.
Monday, February 23, 2026

Reading the Signals: Why Meta Borrows While Swimming in Cash


Meta
3% 
How much Free Cash Flow is left after deducting Share Repurchasing Spend and Equity Withholding Taxes
Alphabet
19%
How Much Free Cash Flow is left after deducting Share Repurchasing and Equity With Holding Taxes


On Feb. 23 the Wall Street Journal published a detailed analysis of Meta’s cash flows and debt levels, exploring how the social media giant is trying to juggle equity awards for employees, cash needed to build AI data centers, and cash needed for ongoing operations, too.

The article is an examination of how to study companies’ financial disclosures so that you can understand how all the pieces fit together. Here at Calcbench, however, we just want to remind everyone — we have all that data there for the taking, with just a few easy clicks.


Let’s start with a recap of the article itself, written by columnist Jonathan Weil. The premise is that while Meta is generating heaps of operating cash flow, which would seemingly help to cover the huge capital expenditures Meta is laying out to build AI data centers, that’s not how it works in practice. 


In practice, because Meta must cover the cash costs of equity compensation given to employees, and those costs are expensive, the company doesn’t have heaps of cash that can cover the costs of data centers. That’s why Meta is taking on new debt to pay for its data centers, even as operating cash flows increase.


This phenomenon — of employee-related equity compensation costs gobbling up free cash flow — exists at lots of tech companies, as Weil’s column notes; Meta just happens to be an outlier example.


With Calcbench, however, analysts can perform your own analysis of this issue quickly and easily. Then you can bring better judgment to your own assessments of whether and how the AI hyperscalers can afford all this.


Let’s walk through a comparison of Meta ($META) and Alphabet ($GOOG). 


Finding the Relevant Disclosures


Finding the relevant disclosures in Calcbench is straightforward. Just go to our Multi-Company page, call up the companies you want to research (in this case, Meta and Alphabet), and enter the relevant disclosures in the Search Standardized Metrics field on the left side of your screen.


For our purposes today, the six metrics we want to study are:


  • Operating cash flow

  • Free cash flow

  • Gross capital expenditures

  • Value of shares repurchased during the period (not the number of shares repurchased, which Calcbench also tracks for you)

  • Payments related to taxes for share-based compensation

  • Total debt


We entered all those metrics, and Calcbench immediately returned Figure 1, below. You should see something similar on your screen.



Among those six metrics, the only one that’s a bit tricky is the payments related to taxes for share-based compensation. Both Meta and Alphabet do list that number in the earnings release, specifically on the Statement of Cash Flows under financing activities — but they tag the disclosure somewhat differently, so you might need to check the actual earnings release to confirm. But the number will always be there somewhere. 


Anyway, once we pulled together the data and lined them up in a spreadsheet, we arrived at Figure 2, below.



Back to Weil’s column in the Wall Street Journal. His key point was that when you add Meta’s repurchase spending and equity withholding taxes together, they equal nearly 97 percent of free cash flow. So Meta actually doesn’t have oodles of spare cash lying around to build data centers; it needs to preserve the $115 billion in operating cash flow for operations, rather than just capex. That’s why the company is tapping debt instruments to pay for its data center dreams. 


By comparison, Alphabet’s repurchase spending and equity withholding taxes are only 81 percent of free cash flow. One could run the same comparison exercise for Amazon ($AMZN), Microsoft ($MSFT), and Oracle ($ORCL) too, although beware that Microsoft and Oracle run on July 1 and June 1 fiscal years, respectively, so their annual report data is rather out of date by now.


So the issue for Meta is that its spending on equity compensation is consuming operating cash flow, which in turn narrows the company’s options to finance its AI data center dreams and drives it toward more debt. Little surprise, then, the Financial Times just had an article too, noting that Meta is cutting staff equity awards for the second year in a row. 


If you’ve been using Calcbench for financial analysis all along, you could’ve seen that coming!

Friday, February 20, 2026
CapEx: Ex Big 6 — Or Is It Big 4? | Calcbench Earnings Monitor
CALCBENCH Earnings Monitor · Feb 20, 2026
Calcbench Earnings Monitor

CapEx: Ex Big 6 — Or Is It Big 4?

📅 Feb 20, 2026 📊 Q4 2025 vs Q4 2024
+14.9%
Broad market CapEx growth
4
Companies driving the gain
−3.4%
CapEx growth ex-hyperscalers

Four Companies Are Driving the Entire CapEx Story

Here is the headline: across more than 1,100 public companies, Capital Expenditures appear to be up nearly 15% year-over-year. But that number is almost entirely a mirage. Strip out four companies — Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft — and CapEx for the rest of corporate America actually fell 3.4% in Q4 2025 versus a year ago.

Four firms. That is the entire story. Everything else is noise.

We will show you the data below — but we wanted to say that up front, because the aggregate number alone is deeply misleading.

Figure 1 — YoY % Change by Metric, Q4 2025 vs Q4 2024  |  CapEx highlighted in orange  |  n = number of reporting firms
Metric Q4 2025 Q4 2024 Firms YoY Change
Revenue$4.32T$4.00T1,344+7.99%
Operating Income$564.0B$488.6B1,478+15.44%
CapEx ▶$310.7B$270.5B1,108+14.87%
Assets$24.13T$22.15T1,464+8.94%
Liabilities$14.58T$13.52T1,427+7.82%
Cost of Revenue$2.68T$2.38T1,219+12.75%
Cash$1.58T$1.42T1,446+11.51%
Net Income$424.3B$397.9B1,392+6.64%
SG&A Expense$573.6B$536.4B1,321+6.95%
Operating Expenses$1.05T$999.6B1,347+5.49%
Inventory$1.47T$1.36T981+7.74%
Operating Cash Flow$750.3B$623.1B1,303+20.41%
Total Debt$6.60T$6.19T1,097+6.67%
Short-Term Investments$548.2B$475.1B321+15.41%
EBIT$547.2B$494.4B1,370+10.68%
Restructuring$8.17B$6.66B295+22.70%
Stock-Based Comp$52.3B$48.1B866+8.72%

CapEx is up nearly 15% in our broad sample — one of the strongest moves in the monitor, trailing only Operating Cash Flow (+20.4%) and Restructuring (+22.7%). It looks impressive. As we noted up front, it is not what it seems.

The Hyperscaler Effect

Big 6 — Or Really Big 4?

With NVIDIA yet to report, six of the Magnificent 7 have now filed results. Not all of them are spending more — Tesla and Apple both cut CapEx year-over-year. The real drivers are just four: Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft, who together added roughly $48 billion in incremental capital spending versus Q4 2024. Here is the breakdown.

Figure 2 — Mag 6 Capital Expenditures ($B), Q4 2025 vs Q4 2024  |  TSLA & AAPL shaded — both declined YoY
Ticker Q4 2025 CapEx Q4 2024 CapEx Delta
MSFT$29.9B$15.8B+$14.1B
GOOG$27.9B$14.3B+$13.6B
AMZN$38.5B$26.1B+$12.4B
META$21.4B$14.4B+$7.0B
TSLA ▼$2.4B$2.8B−$0.4B
AAPL ▼$2.4B$2.9B−$0.6B

Not all of the Magnificent 7 are expanding their capital footprint. Tesla and Apple both cut CapEx year-over-year. The heavy lifting is being done by just four companies.

Combined, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft added roughly $48 billion in incremental CapEx versus the prior year — a striking concentration of investment activity driven almost entirely by AI infrastructure buildout.

The Real Picture

What Happens When You Exclude Them?

Once you remove those six reporting Mag 7 members from our broader sample, the CapEx picture flips — from a +14.9% gain to a modest decline.

Sample CapEx Q4 2025 CapEx Q4 2024 Firms Growth
Ex Mag 6 Reported$188B$194B1,102−3.05%
Ex Mag 4 (ex TSLA & AAPL)$193B$200B1,104−3.44%

Excluding the six reported Mag 7 companies, aggregate CapEx for the remaining 1,102 firms actually fell 3.05% year-over-year. Narrow the exclusion to just the four meaningful spenders — dropping Tesla and Apple back into the sample — and the decline steepens to −3.44%.

The takeaway: the CapEx boom is real, but it is highly concentrated. Strip away four companies, and the rest of corporate America is actually pulling back on capital investment. It is worth noting that this reflects a single quarter of data — one data point is not a trend, and we should be careful about overstating the conclusion. That said, the magnitude of the concentration is difficult to dismiss. When four firms can single-handedly swing a market-wide decline into a double-digit gain, that is a signal worth watching closely, particularly as AI infrastructure investment continues to accelerate.

What's Next

NVIDIA Still to Come

We will revisit this analysis once NVIDIA reports later this month. Given NVIDIA's AI infrastructure buildout, it is likely to add further to the hyperscaler CapEx total — making the concentration story even more pronounced.

📌 This analysis will be updated when NVIDIA files Q4 2025 results. Follow Calcbench for the update.

Calcbench, Inc.  ·  CALCBENCH.COM  ·  Data sourced from SEC filings via Calcbench

Thursday, February 19, 2026

Accounts Receivable Analysis  ·  SIC Division 7

Three Firms With Unbroken DSO Growth, 2020–2025

Of 68 publicly-traded SIC Code Division 7 companies analyzed in Business Services, only three recorded a higher Days Sales Outstanding (DSO) in every successive year from 2020 through 2024. 2025 data shown where available.

This analysis was inspired by a post on Michael Burry's blog, Cassandra Unchained, which originally highlighted Palantir's rising DSO trend. We extended the analysis across all 68 SIC Division 7 companies in our dataset to identify whether the pattern was unique to Palantir.

Palantir Technologies
65.3
2025 DSO (days)
▲ +30.7 days since 2020
Match Group
33.9
2025 DSO (days)
▲ +14.6 days since 2020
Dayforce, Inc.*
51.1
2025 DSO (days, est.)
▲ +11.8 days since 2020

Days Sales Outstanding — Annual, 2020–2025

10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 2025 Days Sales Outstanding Palantir Technologies Match Group Dayforce, Inc.*
Palantir Technologies  SIC 7372 Match Group  SIC 7389 Dayforce, Inc.*  SIC 7372

Source: Calcbench  ·  Export date 2026-02-19  ·  Annual calendar-year periods.
* Dayforce went private 2/6/2026. 2025 value estimated from TTM revenue and Q3 2025 ending receivables balance. Dashed line and open circle indicate estimated data point.

Thursday, February 19, 2026

Retail giant Walmart ($WMT) filed its Q4 and full-year 2025 results today, leading off with a 4.7 percent increase in annual net sales and a 10.5 percent jump in consolidated net income. 

Walmart being a large, sophisticated business, however, the company also reports a host of lower-profile disclosures too. Today we want to spotlight some of those items, how analysts can find them, and what information they might give you as you ponder Walmart’s results.


For example, one useful metric for retailers is the ratio of inventory to net sales. If that number is rising, it means goods are piling up on the shelves while consumers stay away; a state of affairs that often leads retailers to slash prices so they can clear the shelves for next season’s goods. 


We used our Multi-Company page to pull up Walmart’s inventory and net sales numbers for fiscal years 2020-2026; and within a few moments had Figure 1, below.



As you can see, that ratio bulged upward in 2022 and 2023. Inflation surged at that time too, driving consumers to be more cautious with spending. Now Walmart’s inventory-to-sales ratio is 8.3 percent, just a whisker above its pre-pandemic norms of roughly 8 percent.


Segment Growth


Walmart also reports three primary operating segments: Walmart U.S., Sam’s Club (the big box discount division of Walmart), and Walmart International.


You can use either our Segments, Rollforwards, and Breakouts page or the Show Tag History feature to track those segment-level disclosures over time. We used the See Tag History feature to cook up Figure 2, below, in about a minute.



Walmart actually discloses many other segment numbers too, such as e-commerce sales, health and wellness, grocery sales, and geographic segments such as Canada, China, and “Other” international.


Sometimes you can find that data in the earnings release, but not always; and you need to read the footnotes carefully to find the precise disclosure you want. For example, Walmart’s earnings release mentions the word “ecommerce” 17 times and talks about how much e-commerce sales have risen in the last fiscal year, but the earnings release never actually discloses what that number is. 


To find that, analysts need to wait for Walmart to file its full 10-Q report (which should be in a few days) and then you need to pore through the footnotes. 


Or, once the 10-Q is filed, you can use our Segments, Rollforwards, and Breakouts page to search Walmart’s segments disclosure, and we find the number for you!


Figure 3, below, shows what we mean. If you look on the left-hand side, you can see (by the red arrow) that Walmart reported $79.3 billion in e-commerce sales one year ago. We then used the world-famous Calcbench Trace feature to trace that number back to the Walmart footnote about disaggregated revenue (seen on the right side of Figure 3) to identify exactly where Walmart reports its e-commerce numbers and how those numbers have changed in recent years. 




Equity Adjustments


And in perhaps the finest of fine print, Walmart also reports adjustments to EPS based on equity investments it has in other businesses. This isn’t unusual; as we’ve written before, lots of large businesses have equity investments in other businesses and they regularly re-assess the value of those holdings. Sometimes (as we explored in a post about Amazon’s ($AMZN) investments in Anthropic last November) those markups can have a huge effect on overall pretax income.


The change in valuation ultimately gets rolled into EPS, so companies often report adjusted EPS that lets you see how much those investments are or aren’t affecting overall EPS.


That brings us back to Walmart. Tucked away on Page 33 of the earnings release we found a disclosure that the company investments in Symbotic ($SYM), a warehouse automation business, led to a $0.21 hit to EPS in Walmart’s most recent quarter. Hence Walmart reported overall EPS of $0.53 and a non-GAAP adjusted EPS of $0.74.


Perhaps that shouldn’t be a surprise. A quick look at Symbotic’s share price shows that the stock went from a high of nearly $84 in late November to a low of $54 at the end of January, the close of Walmart’s most recent quarter. So of course Walmart had to write down the value of that investment, and here we are.

Thursday, February 12, 2026

China is still a very important trading partner of the United States and most large companies in the world, even amid the tariffs and other trade tensions that exist between the United States and China these days.

So how are those trade tensions affecting the China revenues of major public filers? It’s still early in the reporting season, but we decided to crack open our Segments, Rollforward, and Breakouts page to see what analysts can already glean.


We first selected the S&P 500 and then searched for all firms that reported a China geographic segment in 2025. Thirty-six companies have both (a) already reported their full-year 2025 numbers; and (b) reported revenue for a China operating segment. 


We then compared those China revenues to the firms’ total revenues, and compiled a top 10 list of U.S. filers with the highest percentage of China revenue. See Figure 1, below.



Perhaps to no surprise, the list is dominated by chip companies, some tech giants (Apple, Tesla), and MGM Resorts, presumably thanks to its casinos in Macau. 


Then we wondered: how do these China revenue numbers compare to, say, 2023 numbers? With a few more clicks, we pulled up the China revenue for these same 10 firms in 2023. See Figure 2, below.



Well look at that. Qualcomm ($QCOM) tops the list in both years, but its China revenue declined by $2 billion even as total revenue grew, so the chipmaker is now less dependent on China as a major market than it was two years ago. 


In contrast, Broadcom ($AVGO) held its China revenue essentially flat, but overall revenue went from $35.8 billion to $63.9 billion, so its China concentration fell nearly in half. And MGM International Resorts ($MGM) didn’t even report a China segment in 2023.


But why are we even making everyone look back and forth between figures 1 and 2? Consider Figure 3, below, which just compares 2023 and 2025 China revenue for each company.



Interesting: six of the ten firms in our sample saw China revenue decline over the last two years. Clearly decoupling is underway.


As always, segment-level disclosures are a bit of a dark art, since each company can define geographic segments in its own way. For example, some filers report an “Asia-Pacific” segment that does include China; others report Asia-Pacific and China as separate segments; and still more don’t even report any geographic segment data at all, although they do have China sales.


So our numbers above can only provide a partial snapshot of how U.S. and China trade patterns are evolving over time — but clearly, evolving they are.
Wednesday, February 11, 2026

Big tech stunned the world last week when Amazon ($AMZN) and Google ($GOOG) both filed 2025 earnings reports and also announced plans to spend astonishing amounts of money on data centers in 2026. 

Their big bets came shortly after Meta ($META) and Microsoft ($MSFT) filed their own quarterly reports at the end of January, which also included plans for somewhat smaller but still staggering amounts of money going to data centers this year.


The only one not yet disclosing fresh numbers is Oracle ($ORCL), but they’re scheduled to file their next earnings release on March 9, and we’ve already written about Oracle’s data center ambitions — and obligations — in the recent past. 


So what does the biggest picture look like? Do the hyperscalers even have the cash to cover all these capex costs? We cracked open our Multi-Company page to take a look, tracking capex and operating cash flow by calendar quarter and then adding up those numbers by year, even though Microsoft and Oracle use non-Jan. 1 fiscal years. 


Figure 1, below, shows the combined operating cash flow versus net capex spending for all five companies mentioned above, 2020 through 2025; plus estimated capex for 2026 (as per the companies’ guidance for 2026 capex spending). 



Notice that the spread between capex (in blue) and operating cash flow (in red) has been getting progressively narrower year after year. What we don’t know is estimated operating cash flow for 2026. (The hyperscalers have generally offered guidance on operating income, but that’s not the same.)


We could try to model an estimated operating cash flow by looking at the rate of increase from 2020 numbers ($262.5 billion) through 2025 ($602.83 billion). That rate changed from year to year: up 12.1 percent in 2021, down 0.3 percent in 2022, then up 34.6 percent the following year. 


The average rate of change in operating cash flow across that whole six-year period was 18.7 percent. If we assume 2026 operating cash flow is 18.7 percent higher than 2025 numbers, that implies a value of $715.56 billion. Which would imply a Figure 2, below, that looks like this:


That estimated 2026 differential is a lot narrower. Will it come to pass? We’ll have to wait and see. 

Individual Hyperscalers

Different individual companies tell different stories. For example, here’s the chart for Amazon ($AMZN):



Capex got dangerously close to exceeding operating cash flow in 2025. Then again, capex did exceed operating cash flow in 2021 and 2022, and Amazon is still here (although its share price did go through a marked decline in 2022).


On the other hand, here’s the same chart for Oracle ($ORCL):


A very different story. Oracle had solid operating cash flow over capex until 2024, and then capex soared, and then it soared even more in 2025, and it will soar even further in 2026. Plus, Oracle is a very different business than Amazon, which has always had large capex demands for its e-commerce operations. This is Oracle’s first venture into being a capital-intensive business.

Next we have Google ($GOOG), at a much more orderly progression:



Ditto for Microsoft ($MSFT):


And finally Meta ($META), or Facebook for the old-school purists:

Interesting that Meta also saw compression between operating cash flow and capex spending in 2025. It saw similar compression in 2022 — which, like Amazon, also coincided with a drop in share price over the year. 

The next question for financial analysts is how the hyperscalers will afford all this capex spending in 2026. They could squeeze cash flow even further, but they could also tap the debt markets. That’s what Oracle and Google have both done recently.


Can analysts track the debt that the hyperscalers are shouldering and then model the pressure those interest payments will add to net income, to better understand whether these AI bets are likely to pay off?


Yes, Calcbench lets you do that too. That will be in a future post.

Monday, February 9, 2026

Another week in earnings season, another update from the famed Calcbench Earnings Tracker. Last week we saw hundreds more companies report Q4 and full-year 2025 earnings, and we now have year-over-year data on roughly 700 non-financial firms. Let’s see what tale they tell. 

Figure 1, below, is this week’s snapshot. Net income is up 12.1 percent from the year-ago period, operating income up 21.2 percent, and revenue up 8.2 percent.



Interestingly, cost of revenue is up 14.1 percent. That’s a lot, although it’s down from the 18.3 percent year-over-year gain in last week’s earnings analysis. Since high cost of revenue can indicate higher prices for customers (read: price inflation) down the road, we’ll need to watch that line item closely as more firms file earnings and we get a sense of the bigger picture. Within two weeks we should have a much better view into what’s going on.


On the other hand, operating expenses are up only 5.9 percent, and SG&A expenses up 7.1 percent. Both of those numbers are below revenue increases, which is good. (As for capex spending, we’re devoting a whole separate post to that because the tech giants’ spending on data centers is so off-the-charts nuts it skews the picture for everyone else.) 


Figure 2, below, shows the data again in table format.



Calcbench tracks these earnings using our Earnings Tracker template, which pulls in financial disclosures as companies file their latest earnings releases with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Earnings Tracker provides an up-to-the minute snapshot of financial performance compared to the year-earlier period.


If Calcbench subscribers wish to get their hands on the template we use for this analysis, so you can conduct your own experiments at home, use this link to the file. 


Please note that it will only work with an active Calcbench subscription. If you need an active subscription (and who doesn’t, really, when swift access to real-time data is so important?), contact us at us@calcbench.com.


That’s all for this week. Come back next Friday for more!

Wednesday, February 4, 2026

Disney Corp. ($DIS) released its latest quarterly earnings on Monday, and we get to those numbers momentarily; but the real news came on Tuesday, when Disney announced a successor to legendary and long-time CEO Robert Iger: Josh D’Amaro, who has been running Disney’s theme parks and cruise lines division since 2020.

If you’ve been a close follower of Disney’s financial data, however, D’Amaro’s promotion to the top office isn’t really a surprise.

Disney reports three principal operating segments: 

  • Entertainment, which includes Disney films, television, and streaming services such as Hulu and Disney+;

  • Sports, which is ESPN and various other sports channels overseas; and

  • Experiences, which are the Disney resorts and cruise lines.

One might assume that Disney is primarily an entertainment business because these are the folks who, ya know, invented Mickey Mouse and made zillions of dollars from the Avengers movies. But Disney reports revenue and operating profit for each of the three operating segments above — and if you were a close follower of those segment-level disclosures, you’d have seen that Disney has, inexorably, become more of an experiences company in recent years. 

Let’s start with Figure 1,  below. It shows annual revenue from Disney’s Entertainment and Experiences segments since 2022. (We started there because 2020 and 2021 were marred by the pandemic and travel restrictions.)


Yes, the Entertainment segment (in blue) does generate more revenue overall, but compare the trend lines. The Experiences segment (in red) definitely has a more upward slope. (We excluded the Disney sports segment because its revenues are less than half the other two segments.)

Figure 2, below, shows the operating profit for Entertainment and Experiences over the same periods.


The Experiences segment generates multiple times more operating profit than the Entertainment segment, and the overall trend-lines are nearly identical in slope.

The health of the Experiences segment is D’Amaro’s doing. Moreover, Disney is rolling out more parks in the near future, and it’s a business one can understand. The Entertainment segment still inhabits a strategic free-for-all zone where nobody is quite sure how artificial intelligence, social media, and evolving consumer appetite for going to the movies will all shake out.


So if Disney was going to select an Iger successor from the inside, D’Amaro was always going to be at the top of a very short list. All a Disney analyst on the outside had to do was study the segment-level disclosures over time.


Finding Segment Disclosures


As always, that’s easy to do in Calcbench. 


For starters, try our Segments, Rollforwards, and Breakouts page. Select the company you want to research, and then the segment you want to study from the pull-down menu at left. (You can search for operating, geographic, and other segments that a company might report.) 


Figure 3, below, shows the results when you search for Disney’s operating segment disclosures in its fiscal Q1 2026, the numbers filed earlier this week. The blue-highlighted column is the Experiences segment mentioned above.



From there you can export the data to Excel for further analysis.


If you stumble upon a segment disclosure while studying a company on the Disclosures and Footnotes Query page, you can always hold your cursor over that number for the See Tag History and Export History to Excel choices. Same data, exported to the same user (you), just via a different channel.


And of course if you use the Calcbench API, all this data gets pumped directly into your own desktop analysis models within minutes of the company’s filings hitting the Securities and Exchange Commission database. All of it groomed, polished, and traceable as always.


Our ultimate point being that you can connect those human elements of corporate analysis, like possible CEO succession, back to corporate data. Sometimes the signs are there all along, if you just know how to tease them out — like, by using Calcbench.
Friday, January 30, 2026

Another week in earnings season, another update from the famed Calcbench Earnings Tracker. We now have Q4 earnings data from more than 320 non-financial firms — and so far, those firms are reporting impressive net income growth from the year-ago period.

Figure 1, below, is this week’s snapshot. Net income is up 15.1 percent from one year ago, revenue is up 6 percent, and cash from operations is up 25.1 percent. All numbers moving in the direction Wall Street wants to see.



If you want to worry about anything, you could fret over cost of revenue, operating expenses, and SG&A expenses — all of which are currently rising faster than overall revenue, which implies that companies will start to feel inflationary pressures sometime soon. Then again, we still have a relatively small number of companies in our sample size, and the picture could look quite different in another four weeks or so, when we’ll have nearly 10 times as many earnings releases to digest. 


Figure 2, below, shows the data again in table format.



Calcbench tracks these earnings using our Earnings Tracker template, which pulls in financial disclosures as companies file their latest earnings releases with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Earnings Tracker provides an up-to-the minute snapshot of financial performance compared to the year-earlier period.


If Calcbench subscribers wish to get their hands on the template we use for this analysis, so you can conduct your own experiments at home, use this link to the file. 


Please note that it will only work with an active Calcbench subscription. If you need an active subscription (and who doesn’t, really, when swift access to real-time data is so important?), contact us at us@calcbench.com.


That’s all for this week. Come back next Friday for more!

Thursday, January 29, 2026

Some of you may have noticed that companies are disclosing more tax information lately, thanks to a new accounting rule that requires filers to break out taxes paid to federal, state, local, and even overseas tax authorities.

If tax analysis is your thing, fear not! Calcbench has an easy way to find all this information and we’ve even cooked up a template to track tax disclosures automatically.


These new disclosures arise from updates to tax accounting rules that the Financial Accounting Standards Board adopted in 2023, and which went into effect with annual 10-K filings that companies started to make this month. Previously, companies only disclosed a single number for “income tax provisions.” Now they must report individual amounts and percentages for a variety of taxes paid or tax credits claimed, and do so in a nice table format.


One of the first companies to report these new details was Netflix ($NFLX), with its annual report filed on Jan. 23. Figure 1, below, is the new table that you see when you go digging through Netflix’ tax footnote.



Here is another example from Facebook — er, Meta Platforms ($META) — from its 10-K filed on Thursday morning. See Figure 2, below.



You can find these tables and disclosures via the Calcbench Disclosures & Footnotes Query page. Just look up the 10-K filing of the company you’re researching, find the tax footnote from the disclosures pull-down menu on the left side of the screen, and the disclosures will be in there. You can also try searching for “ASU 2023-09” in the text, since that’s the accounting rule prompting these new disclosures.


And of course, since Calcbench is all about ease of finding data, we have a few other short-cuts you can use too.


Finding Tax Data Quickly


One way to find tax disclosures quickly is via our Multi-Company page. Once you configure the group of companies you want to study, you can enter “income taxes” in the search fields and the disclosures that companies have made (if any) will automatically appear. 


For example, we searched the S&P 500 for companies that have already filed their 2025 annual reports, and looked up the federal, state and local, and foreign taxes paid. Figure 3, below, shows some of the results.



As you can see, a large number of companies still haven’t filed 2025 reports yet so we don’t have much data — but it will come soon! As companies file, Calcbench automatically indexes and collates that information so it’s at your fingertips. (You can also export the data to Excel for further analysis on your own desktop.) 


Calcbench also created a template to capture these tax disclosures as companies file them. The data populates automatically, so you’re getting the most comprehensive information as fast as possible. All you need is (a) a Premium-level Calcbench subscription; and (b) the Calcbench Excel Add-In. (If you need help with either of those, drop us an email at us@calcbench.com.)


That’s all there is to it!

Friday, January 23, 2026

Welcome back to earnings season, everyone! The famed Calcbench Earnings Tracker has nearly 150 Q4 2025 earnings reports in the hopper — not a large number, but big enough for us to fire up the analysis engine running again.

At midday on Friday, Jan. 23, we were tracking data from 149 non-financial firms that have already filed their Q4 2025 reports. Collectively, that group reported net income 2 percent lower than what they reported one year ago, although operating income was up 23.1 percent and revenue was up 5.9 percent. 


Huh, wait a minute. If revenue is up a decent amount and operating income is up by more than 20 percent, but net income has declined, doesn’t that imply some big expense further down the income statement related to taxes or restructuring charges or something like that? 


Indeed it does, and indeed that has happened. See Figure 1, below. 



We have a huge spike in tax provisions (up 205.1 percent) and an impressive jump in restructuring costs, too (up 48.5 percent). 


That tax spike, however, is almost entirely due to a statistical quirk from one company, Abbott Labs ($ABT). Abbott received a $7.2 billion tax credit in the year-ago period, which declined to a $582 million credit in Q4. Technically that results in a $6.6 billion “increase” in tax provision for Abbott, which skews the number for the whole sample. If you exclude Abbott and its weirdness, tax payments actually fell by nearly 22 percent. 


To that end, we did recalculate everything with the tax column excluded. The result is Figure 2, below. 



We need to emphasize that this first assessment of Q4 earnings comes with a host of caveats. First, there are only 150-ish companies in our sample size, a small fraction of the total number that end up in the Calcbench Earnings Tracker. (For example, we had more than 3,800 firms in our final assessment of Q3 earnings.) Important chunks of the economy are still missing from this Q4 picture, such as the tech giants; they’re mostly going to file next week. Crucial retailers such as Target ($TGT) and Walmart ($WMT) won’t file until later still. 

Second, these early filers tend to be large companies, with more sturdy and robust financial fundamentals than smaller ones. The smaller folks won’t start to file until mid-February, and the big picture we start to see then might look very different from the glimpse portrayed by the biggest of filers now. 


Figure 3, below, shows the data again in table format.



Calcbench tracks these earnings using our Earnings Tracker template, which pulls in financial disclosures as companies file their latest earnings releases with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Earnings Tracker provides an up-to-the minute snapshot of financial performance compared to the year-earlier period.


If Calcbench subscribers wish to get their hands on the template we use for this analysis, so you can conduct your own experiments at home, use this link to the file. 


Please note that it will only work with an active Calcbench subscription. If you need an active subscription (and who doesn’t, really, when swift access to real-time data is so important?), contact us at us@calcbench.com.


That’s all for this week. Come back next Friday for more!

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