Prior to today our API and Excel add-in required users to request specific fiscal periods. For example, you had to specify that you wanted Apple’s 2014 revenue or Walmart’s Q3 2015 net income. The challenge this presented was that you needed to know what fiscal periods were available, and since not all companies report at the same time or use the same fiscal year ends, this was tricky to say the least.
Today we’re releasing a new search attribute for relative periods. Relative periods allow you to request data relative to the most recent data available in our database. For example, if you’re looking to return Apple’s most recent annual revenue you would use 0 for the relative period. This will always return Apple’s most recent annual revenue figure so when they report next year’s figures your request will return the new values. Using a relative period of 1 will always return the next most recent data so it will also roll forward when new data becomes available.
You can also use relative periods for quarterly or year-to-date data using the same approach. In this case a relative period of 0 will return the most recent quarterly or year-t0-date data available.
We’ve put together a few examples to illustrate how relative periods work in the Excel add-in and the API.
Excel Add-In
This function will return Apple’s most recent annual revenue:
=TAGNIFI("tagnifi.fundamentals.value","AAPL","Revenue","annual",,,,,"0")
This function will return Apple’s most recent quarterly revenue:
=SPREADCLOUD("tagnifi.fundamentals.value","AAPL","Revenue","quarter",,,,,"0")
Note that these Excel functions will return the revenue for the latest period but you might also want to know which fiscal period is being returned. This can be accomplished by changing the data type in the function from value to fiscal_year or fiscal_quarter. Here is an example of a function that will return the fiscal year associated with Apple’s most recent annual revenue:
=TAGNIFI(“tagnifi.fundamentals.fiscal_year”,”AAPL”,”Revenue”,”annual”,,,,,”0″)
This function will return the fiscal quarter associated with Apple’s most recent quarterly revenue:
=SPREADCLOUD("tagnifi.fundamentals.fiscal_quarter","AAPL","Revenue","quarter",,,,,"0")
API Examples
The new API attribute for the relative period is relative_period. Here are some examples:
This API request will return Apple’s most recent annual revenue:
https://api.tagnifi.com/fundamentals?company=AAPL&tag=revenue&period_type=annual&relative_period=0
This API request will return Apple’s most recent quarterly revenue:
https://api.tagnifi.com/fundamentals?company=AAPL&tag=revenue&period_type=quarter&relative_period=0
For more information, please visit our API Reference.
If you have any questions about these new capabilities, please send us a note at support@tagnifi.com.