Not logged in - Login

XigniteFinancials FAQ

Company Financial FAQs

In XigniteFinancials, all APIs count a request as one hit per financial item returned. Some of XigniteFinancials APIs return a single financial item (i.e. GetCompanyFinancial). Other APIs return an entire Income Statement, Balance Sheet, or Cash Flow Statement (i.e. GetCompanyIncomeStatement) and therefore return many financial items.
  • Calling a single line item using an API like GetCompanyFinancial (e.g. TotalRevenue) counts as one hit.
  • Calling an financial statement for one company, will count as many hits as financial items in the entire Statement. For instance, in our model, an Income Statement typically has 32 items, so it will count as 32 hits.
Here are the count statistics for our main financial statements:
  • Income Statement: 32 Hits
  • Balance Sheet: 66 Hits
  • Cash Flow Statement: 39 Hits
If you have more questions on hit counting methods in XigniteFinancials, you may send an e-mail to support@xignite.com.

Negative Free Cash Flow values are not necessarily a bad sign. To review, Free Cash Flow is calculated by taking Earnings Before Income & Taxes (EBIT) + Depreciation & Amortization - Change in Net Working Capital - Capital Expenditure. There are a few reasons why a company might return a negative value in the FreeCashFlow field from a query in XigniteFinancials:
  • The primary reason is that a company may use free cash to make a significant investment - either in a new project, or a subsidiary division. This is done with the assumption that long-term returns will result from this investment.
  • Some companies use Free Cash to acquire a smaller company.
  • It can be a bad sign as well, which means the company is potentially losing its liquidity.
  • If there is one outlying value of negative Free Cash Flow, it will likely be due to investment activity and it is best to research recent activity - checking the Investor Relations area of the corporate web site often reveals activity to explain these values.
  • When a company shows several statements of negative Free Cash Flow, then it can be a sign of danger/bad performance.
If you still have questions on Free Cash Flow values after reading this, you may send an e-mail to support@xignite.com.

In the XigniteFinancials API, the value commonly known as "Earnings Before Income, Taxes & Depreciation/Amortization" (EBITDA) is referred to as "OpeartingIncomeBeforeDepreciation". This applies to all versions of the XigniteFinancials service.  Here are example API calls in Version 1 and Version 2 (be sure to test both URLs if you are unsure which Version your organization uses): If you have any more questions about this data, or other Financial Data Points, please Open a Case or send an e-mail to support@xignite.com
There are multiple reasons why our financial numbers may not always match those you see on popular financial web sites such as Yahoo!Finance or Google Finance:
  • Xignite, Yahoo!Finance and Google use different sources. Xignite licenses its US and Canadian information from Morningstar--one of the leading financial data vendors in the industry. Yahoo! Finance and Google use different sources. Different data sources use different methodologies for accounting data classification, and they collect and cleanse data at different times. All those can introduce differences--which doesn't imply that one or another data source is inaccurate.
  • Xignite and Morningstar may structure and organize financial accounts differently from other sources and web sites. For instance, another source may name a line item differently. Or one line item on another source may be allocated across two line items in our APIs--or vice versa. It can therefore be difficult to match line items on Yahoo!Finance or Google Finance. For instance, what Yahoo!Finance calls Earnings Before Interest And Taxes, Xignite calls Income Before Income Taxes.
  • Xignite and Morningstar may calculate certain values differently. If you have limited experience with how financial data is structured and reported, this fact may seem surprising. However, it is actually quite common. Not every company reports financial information in the same fashion. Although standards such as XBRL exist, a lot of the financials filings made by companies are subject to interpretation by financial analysts at each data vendors. Vendors make decisions whether one line item from a financial statement should be incorporated into a given line item in their data set. The net result is that the numbers may not match for categories that seem to be named similarly. This of course does not apply to things like top items in Financial Statements as those statements should still foot correctly. For instance items like Total Assets or Total Liabilities should typically match from one provider to the next.
In summary, be very careful when comparing our data to that of another site unless you want to spend a lot of time reconciling subtleties in the way financial data is reported--unless of course that other site is Morningstar. A data set can only been proved as inaccurate if it is incorrect compared to the initial filings made the firm (10-K and 10-Q SEC filings in the US for instance).

We often get questions about the differences above. Please understand that at no time do we make representation that the financial numbers delivered by our services should exactly match the organization and values of those on popular financial web sites. We actually consider such comparisons unfair and misplaced unless a discrepancy can be tracked back to the source filing.

If you want to report an item that you have the conviction is inaccurate, please provide:
  • The security symbol this applies to (e.g. GOOG)
  • The period and period type this applies to (e.g. Annual Statement for Fiscal Year 2012)
  • The FinancialType this applies to (e.f. OperatingIncome)
  • An explanation as to why you believe it is inaccurate including reference to the original SEC filings available on EDGAR, the company annual report from the company's Investor Relations Web Site or the Morningstar web site.
With this information, we can verify the validity of the information as escalate it to Morningstar if necessary. Any inquiry as to why our information is difference from that of another financial web site will be responded by pointing to this FAQ unless the 4 points of information above are provided.