Excel -1 project
Welcome to this video presentation on downloading financial statements from the SEC EDGAR database for ACCT 370: Financial statement analysis. The Securities and Exchange Commission is an agency of the US federal government that oversees publicly traded companies. It requires that publicly traded companies compile annual financial reports called 10-Ks and quarterly financial reports called 10-Qs. The mandatory report of publicly traded companies’ financial information helps investors to better make decisions on how to invest their money. The reports of publicly traded companies are posted on the EDGAR database for public viewing.EDGAR stands for the electronic data gathering, analysis, and retrieval system. Our primary focus in this course is on the 10-K annual reports. These financial reports give information for an annual or year long period. To access financial statements on the EDGAR database, you should start by going to the website www.sec.gov. Once you get to the Securities and Exchange Commission website, look to the top right hand corner for the search bar. Directly below the search bar, there is a button called company filings. This is denoted with the red arrow on your screen. Click the company filings button. After clicking the company filings button, you’ll be taken to the EDGAR database search page. On the left side of the screen, you have a search bar where you can search by company name. On the right side, you have a fast search box, which allows you to search by the company’s ticker. While either method is acceptable, please be aware that if you use the company name search box, you may be inundated with a long list of search results, especially if your company has a fairly common name. The fastest way to get to your company’s financial information is using the fast search box with the ticker symbol. In this example, we’re going to be looking at Wendy’s restaurants. I entered the Wendy’s ticker which is WEN into the fast search box and clicked search. It took me directly to the Wendy’s profile page, which is shown on your screen. In the blue box at the top of the screen, you see identifying or demographic information for the company. As you can see, we’re looking at Wendy’s company, which is an eating or drinking place or restaurant, so we know that we have the correct company. You can also see information about the business’ main address, mailing address, and other identifying information. Directly below the blue box is an opportunity to filter the results. Below that filter results box is a list of all of the companies filings on the EDGAR database. For a company like Wendy’s, there will be many filings, so it makes it easier for you to find the information you need by filtering the results. The red arrow on the left points to the filing type box. In that box, you should type 10-K. The red arrow on the right points to the search box. Once you’ve typed 10-K in the filing type box, click the search button and it will filter the results so that you will only see 10-K annual reports that have been issued by Wendy’s. Here’s what the results look like from Wendy’s. As you can see, the 10-k reports are listed in reverse chronological order, meaning that the most recent report or the most recently issued report is on the top and then the 10-k filings move down from there from most recent to older reports. We are most interested in the most recent report, which will give us a good picture of how Wendy’s is doing currently. We want to select the blue interactive Data button for the 1st 10-K report in our listing. The red arrow points to this button. Again, click the blue interactive data button. Once you click that button, it will take you to an interactive data page for Wendy’s company’s most recent 10-K. At the very top of the screen, you’ll see an option to print the document or to view the Excel document. You can also see in the yellow menu on the left options to browse through the company’s key figures from their 10-k report. This will allow you to quickly view the financial statements, the notes to the financial statements, and other key items from the document. For this purpose, we want to download the Excel document, so that you have what you need to begin your Excel project. Click on the button to view the Excel document, and this will download an Excel workbook to your computer with the key information from Wendy’s company’s 10-K report. Once the workbook is downloaded to your computer, we need to take out any extraneous information that is not necessary for our project. Delete all of the tabs in the workbook except for the 3 key financial statements. The 1st financial statement you need to keep is the income statement. Depending on your company, this may be called a statement of operations or statement of earnings. However, all income statements show revenues and expenses to calculate the company’s net income. The 2nd financial statement you need is the balance sheet. Depending on your company, this may be called a statement of financial position. You also need a 3rd financial statement, the statement of cash flows. All other tabs in the Excel workbook can be deleted except for these 3 financial statements. This will give you the information you need to start your Excel project and follow through with the instructions given in the instructions document.
