Reporting periods
Distinguish fiscal years, quarters, year-to-date values and point-in-time balances.
Financial data is indexed by the company's fiscal year, the year it uses for financial reporting. A fiscal year may end in a month other than December. Document filters and dataset values use the same reporting-period conventions, with compact strings for filters and structured objects for dataset calls.
Document periods
Document filters use compact strings such as 2025Y for fiscal year 2025 or
2025Q2 for its second quarter. start_period and end_period are inclusive:
both boundary periods are included.
These filters refer to the period a report covers. They do not filter by the
date the company published the report. Document results include period,
report_date, and publish_date as separate fields.
Dataset periods
Build/Update Dataset uses the shared structured reporting period for targets, existing observations, returned values, calculation references and result filters:
{"year": 2025, "period_type": "Q", "period": 2}
| Field | Meaning |
|---|---|
year | Finbar fiscal-year label, between 1900 and 2500 |
period_type | Reporting-period type from the table below |
period | Period number within the fiscal year; 0 for annual periods |
| Type | Valid numbers | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
Y | 0 | Full fiscal year |
H | 1–2 | First or second half-year |
Q | 1–4 | Discrete fiscal quarter |
QC | 1–4 | Cumulative quarters from fiscal-year start; QC3 is the first nine months |
M | 1–12 | Month within the fiscal year |
YT | 0 | Transitional year when the fiscal year-end changes |
QT | 1–4 | Transitional quarter when the fiscal year-end changes |
For a March year-end company, {"year": 2026, "period_type": "Q", "period": 1}
means April–June 2025. Its full year is {"year": 2026, "period_type": "Y", "period": 0}.
Monthly dataset coordinates are fiscal; monthly document labels follow the
separate calendar-month convention used for document filtering.
Balances, flows and cumulative values
The same target period can populate both balance and flow rows. For Q2, revenue covers the second quarter and cash is the balance at that quarter-end. The row definition establishes which meaning applies; describe it explicitly where the label could be ambiguous. There is no separate zero-duration coordinate.
Q2 and H1 end at the same point but remain distinct: Q2 revenue covers only the second quarter; H1 revenue covers the first half. The service preserves the exact supplied period type, including QC1/Q1 and QC2/H1, when matching observations and calculation references. Transitional periods require source evidence of the actual reporting interval; the service does not assume a standard duration.
Choosing periods for Build/Update Dataset
Supply 1–40 unique structured target_periods. Every target applies to every
supplied row, with at most 2,000 row/period targets per request. Unsupported,
null or invalid period/type combinations are rejected before paid work starts.
There is no automatic latest-period selection.
Returned observations identify their row and period and include evidence or an unresolved reason. Match observations by these identifiers when assembling result pages. See Build/Update Dataset for the request, result and source formats.