Thursday, October 14, 2021

Another day, another nifty time-saving feature we are happy to offer Calcbench subscribers. This time around it’s an ability to export earnings release data directly to Excel, almost immediately after said earnings release hits the wires.

Here’s how it works. Start at our always-popular Recent Filings page. This is where Calcbench presents the latest filings from public firms, which we capture and prep typically within a few minutes of those firms filing their disclosures to the Securities and Exchange Commission. See Figure 1, below.

Notice that column on the right-hand side that says “Export to Excel” in numerous places. Behind the scenes, Calcbench has indexed the data in those filings so that they can be, you guessed it, exported directly to Excel.

When you click on that option, an Excel file will download onto your computer that you can open, read, and start using. For example, we downloaded the Citigroup ($C) third-quarter earnings release filed this morning, and immediately saw this, Figure 2.

The spreadsheet shows the financial results Citi presented in its earnings release: 3Q 2021, plus the prior quarter, plus the year-ago quarter. You can even see quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year change!

Figure 2 is just one example of what you’d see from Citigroup; there’s a lot more in the Excel spreadsheet that we haven’t shown. Our Export to Excel feature can capture just about any table with tagged data that a company includes in its earnings release, from a summary of financial performance, to full income statement or balance sheet, and even reconciliation statements.

The flip side is that if a firm doesn’t file lots of information in its earnings release, the Excel spreadsheet will be smaller. For example, we also have this Q3 summary from Morgan Stanley ($MS), also filed today, in Figure 3, below.

Morgan Stanley only offered 3Q 2021 and 3Q 2020 data in its release, so that’s all we can pull. If you want 2Q 2021 or other periods, you gotta wait for Morgan Stanley to file its full 10-Q report in a few weeks.

We should also add that our new exporting capability works for some earnings releases, but not all. Some firms will structure their releases in quirky ways that leave the data beyond indexing. Tesla ($TSLA), for example, is a party-pooper that files its earnings release as a JPEG image. Humans can read that, but algorithms can’t — so you won’t be able to do this nifty stuff with Tesla. (If you look back to Figure 1, you can see a few other firms where Export to Excel isn’t available either. Most of the S&P 500 will be, but it’s not universal.)

You can, however, still read filings from Tesla or any other errant firm in our usual Interactive Disclosures database, and export the data to Excel from there. It’s one extra step, but you do end up in the same place. For more information on earnings press releases, check out our how-to video. 


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