Four clocks describe one accounting fact
A financial fact has a period to which it relates, a time when it becomes public, a time when a chosen data system makes it available, and a time when the research process uses it. These clocks can differ materially. A December year-end value is not available for a December trade simply because its reporting period ends then.
The SEC's EDGAR API documentation describes company submissions and extracted XBRL facts. These are useful source records, but a current API response is not automatically a reconstruction of every historical information set. A point-in-time claim requires the relevant filing version, availability evidence and a rule for selecting among overlapping facts. A field called filed is not a complete intraday execution timestamp.
Preserve revisions rather than rewriting history
Consider a fictional December 31 accounting period with earnings per share of $2.00 released on February 15. A correction published on May 10 changes that period's EPS to $1.60. For a March 1 decision, the original $2.00 is the eligible observation if it was available through the specified process. The correction belongs to later information sets.
An updated download that shows only $1.60 can support a retrospective accounting analysis, but not that March decision without additional archival evidence. Applying a fixed 90-day lag to the revised value does not recover the missing original. A lag is an explicit availability assumption; it cannot undo hindsight embedded in a restatement.
Build an as-of selection rule
Represent each fact with issuer identity, concept, units, period boundaries, filing accession or source identifier, value and availability timestamp. Keep amendments as additional versions. At a decision cutoff, select only versions eligible under the declared information policy, then apply a deterministic priority rule. Avoid choosing the newest value across all downloaded history before filtering by time.
Reconcile annual and quarterly concepts carefully. A year-to-date cash-flow fact is not a standalone quarter; subtracting two cumulative values is valid only when they use compatible scope and accounting versions. Custom tags may require manual mapping. Consolidated and segment facts can share similar labels while measuring different things. Preserve those distinctions rather than coercing every numeric field into one universal column.
Use honest labels when evidence is incomplete
Sample difficult records against their original filings and test whether later amendments change earlier decisions. Verify timezone conversion and whether an after-hours release moves eligibility to the next decision window. Vendor arrival can lag public availability, so distinguish a public-information research assumption from an operational claim about what a particular system received. Those are different standards of evidence.
If only publication dates are known, use a conservative date-level rule and disclose the unresolved intraday timing. If original versions are missing, label the analysis revised-data or lag-assumed rather than point-in-time. The fictional timeline below demonstrates version selection only. No real issuer filings were reconstructed and no historical strategy performance was calculated for this guide.
Inspect the example
| Fictional record | Information date | EPS value | Eligible for March 1 decision? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Accounting period ends | December 31 | Not yet published | No |
| Original release | February 15 | $2.00 | Yes, subject to declared arrival cutoff |
| Correction for same period | May 10 | $1.60 | No |
| Current-only revised extract | Downloaded after May 10 | $1.60 | Insufficient evidence for reconstruction |
Sources & reproduction
Primary references support the definitions and method. Numerical examples are illustrative unless a source record is explicitly identified.