Reclassified to Conform

Abstract

A company's financial statements over many years must be assembled from many filings. Each filing may rename, combine, split or move its lines, and restates only the last two or three years to match. Filings provide no consistent, machine-readable mapping between successive statements, and neither a line's label nor its XBRL tag is fixed. We treat the reconstruction as an optimization problem. A tag that keeps its numbers from one filing to the next is taken to be the same line, and such runs are joined into strands before any edit is weighed. At each boundary between filings, the candidate edits that pass the check their kind requires are listed, each with the strand endpoints it would explain and a price for how much it asks the reader to believe beyond what the filings show. An integer program picks the cheapest set of the listed edits that accounts for every line exactly once, and the chosen edits trace each line through the filings. The result is a statement whose rows follow one line across every year, comparable within each filing's restated window and marked where a number was restated or derived, in any filing's layout, with each number cited to the filing that stated it and each declared total re-checked. On 200 companies drawn at random, 99.9% of the totals that can be checked add up. Among the 124 with a usable vendor comparison, the lines the method follows agree with the vendor's series on 96% of the cells both fill, reach 10% more cells than a tag alone and agree with the vendor on 90% of those. The method also yields a record of what each company changed in its reporting.