SEC XBRL financial data: what it gives you and what it leaves out

SEC XBRL financial data gives you every number a US company tags in its 10-K and 10-Q filings, each with a us-gaap or company-specific concept, a period and a unit. It does not give you a clean quarterly series: fourth quarters, discrete cash flows and the right version of restated figures have to be built on top of it.

We are Clarifo, a financial data service for US and Nordic listed companies, and we build our company financials from these filings. This article explains what the raw XBRL facts contain, the five things a dataset has to add, and shows the result on Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN, Nasdaq), with the concept and basis behind each quarterly figure.

What SEC XBRL financial data contains

Since US companies file their financial statements in inline XBRL, every figure in the statements and many in the notes carries a machine-readable tag. Each fact has four parts: a concept (for example us-gaap:OperatingIncomeLoss), a value, a unit (USD, or USD per share for earnings per share) and a context that states the period it covers. Document and entity information sits in separate dei tags, such as DocumentFiscalYearFocus, DocumentFiscalPeriodFocus and DocumentPeriodEndDate.

That is a lot of structure, and it is what makes US company data comparable at all. But it is a set of facts per filing, not a time series per company. Five gaps show up as soon as you try to chart quarters.

Five things a dataset has to add to SEC XBRL financial data

The cards and list below cover what we do between the SEC's facts and the figures you see on a company page or through our Data API.

• Concept mapping. Revenue alone appears under several us-gaap concepts. In our data, Amazon's revenue uses RevenueFromContractWithCustomerExcludingAssessedTax, while Alphabet Inc. (GOOGL, Nasdaq) and Exxon Mobil Corporation (XOM, NYSE) report revenue under Revenues. Company-specific extension tags (concepts with the company's own prefix instead of us-gaap) cover lines the standard taxonomy has no element for, and they need a manual or rule-based mapping before they can be compared.
• Year-to-date cash flow. Many 10-Q cash flow statements give only the year to date, so the second quarter is six months minus three. A dataset has to subtract and say it did.
• The missing fourth quarter. Companies file three 10-Qs and one 10-K. The fourth quarter is the full year minus the first three quarters.
• Restated comparatives. A later 10-K presents the prior year again, sometimes reclassified. The dataset has to record which filing each value comes from.
• Fiscal calendars. The dei tags give the company's own fiscal year and period. The Home Depot, Inc. (HD, NYSE) calls the year ended 1 February 2026 its fiscal 2025, so a label without an end date is ambiguous.

Worked example: Amazon's quarters, with the concept and basis of each line

The table shows Amazon's quarterly revenue, operating income and operating cash flow from the fourth quarter of 2024 to the second quarter of 2026, with the basis our data records for each quarter.

Source: Amazon.com, Inc. Forms 10-Q and 10-K, fiscal years 2024 to 2026 (fiscal year = calendar year), USD million, data as of 2026-10-28. Concepts: revenue us-gaap:RevenueFromContractWithCustomerExcludingAssessedTax; operating income us-gaap:OperatingIncomeLoss; operating cash flow us-gaap:NetCashProvidedByUsedInOperatingActivities. Q4 = full year minus Q1 to Q3.¹²

Two rows were never filed as quarters. Amazon's FY2025 10-K reports revenue of USD 716,924 million for the year; the first three 10-Qs add up to USD 503,538 million, so the fourth quarter is USD 213,386 million (our calculation from reported figures, and the value our data shows with the formula Q4 = FY − (Q1 + Q2 + Q3) and the four source filings listed). The same subtraction gives the fourth-quarter operating income and cash flow.

For the 10-Q quarters, our data marks Amazon's operating cash flow as reported for the quarter alone. For a company whose 10-Q shows only year-to-date cash flow, the second- and third-quarter figures have to be derived by subtraction as well, and a derived flag on them is what you want to see before you put a quarterly cash flow into a model.

Restated comparatives: which filing a figure comes from

Amazon's FY2024 revenue of USD 637,959 million appears in two places: as the current year in the FY2024 10-K, filed on 7 February 2025, and as the comparative year in the FY2025 10-K, filed on 6 February 2026. Our data shows both references: the FY2024 10-K as the original filing and the FY2025 10-K as the source the figure was read from.²

Here the two versions match. When a company restates, reclassifies or reports a discontinued operation, they do not, and a dataset that silently takes the latest comparative will change your history without telling you. The check is simple: does each figure carry the accession number of the filing it came from?

Getting SEC XBRL financial data through the Clarifo Data API

Our Data API serves these figures as standard REST with JSON responses and an OpenAPI spec, for US companies from SEC EDGAR and for Nasdaq Helsinki and Nasdaq Stockholm companies from their filings. A request for one fiscal quarter looks like this:

GET /api/v1/data/companies/AMZN/financials?year=2025&quarter=4

Year and quarter are the company's own fiscal year and quarter. Keys are created in Settings under API Keys & Usage, start with clf_ and are sent as a bearer token. Field-level details are in our API docs; for the wider checklist, see what to expect from an equity research data platform.

The same figures are available in Claude and ChatGPT through our read-only MCP server. A prompt that shows the basis of each quarter: