Earnings research

Use the headline to form a question. Use the filing to test it.

A repeatable before-and-after workflow, without an estimated calendar masquerading as a confirmed reporting date.

Open your research worksheet Find a company's last filing

Before the release: freeze the baseline

Open the last 10-Q and the annual report. Write down the reporting period, the main operating question, and the company's definition of any adjusted measure. Choose two things to verify rather than collecting twenty disconnected metrics.

For a retailer, that might be sales and inventory relative to sales. For a capital-intensive platform, it might be operating cash and investment payments. The choice should follow the business, not the fields available in a dashboard.

Build the pre-earnings checklist

After the call: record a testable claim

Replace "management sounded confident" with a claim you can inspect: margin improvement, cash conversion, demand, or lower customer concentration. Record where the claim came from and whether it described the completed period or a forecast.

Do not turn a forward-looking statement into a reported fact. If the release uses an adjusted number, save the reconciliation before comparing it with a GAAP line in the filing.

Verify management claims

When the filing arrives: resolve the difference

Match the form, accession, currency, and duration. Read the footnote attached to the metric that matters. A quarterly income statement and a year-to-date cash-flow statement cannot be compared as though both describe three months.

If the filing and release appear inconsistent, check definitions, rounding, non-GAAP adjustments, and reporting scope before assuming the business changed.

Follow the full verification sequence

A worked example

Meta's 2024 cash-flow notebook shows why a missing finance-lease deduction changes a seemingly simple calculation. Reproduce it before building your next earnings worksheet.

Confirm the reporting date at the issuer

Earnings announcements and SEC filing dates are different events. Use the company's investor-relations calendar for a confirmed announcement, then use SEC EDGAR for the filed document. Quantfil does not infer a future earnings date from the last filing.

Practice with the source references for Apple, Meta, or Microsoft.