Why use a financial data API when SEC data is free?
Downloading SEC data is free. Searching it, cleaning it, and checking its financial values takes work. Here’s what Chadwin handles for you.
By Chad Mazzola
SEC data is free. So why pay for a financial data API?
Because downloading a filing is a small part of getting it into your product. You still need to find the right documents, deal with inconsistent metadata, process their contents, and work within SEC download limits.
Here are some of the problems Chadwin solves for you.
Normalizing financial statements
This is one of the hardest parts of working with SEC data: making financial figures comparable across companies and years.
The SEC provides financial facts with machine-readable labels called tags, but companies don’t all use the same tags or present their accounts the same way. Even when a tag matches, the number may not be the one you want.
A few examples show why:
- The wrong business scope: a revenue figure might describe one segment rather than the whole company. Both figures can carry the same tag, with different context
- Overlapping amounts: a reported debt total may already include finance leases. Adding the leases again overstates debt. Cash can also include restricted balances that aren’t freely available to the business
- Missing or conflicting values: an absent amount isn’t zero, and two different values for the same period can’t be resolved by simply picking the first one
These mistakes can produce numbers that look reasonable and pass through your code without an error.
Chadwin normalizes financial statements into consistently defined fields. We resolve supported values from the filing, check the periods and accounting scope, and test whether statement totals and components agree. We review results against the original disclosures and leave unsupported values unavailable rather than inventing an answer.
You can compare companies and calculate financial metrics using consistently defined values, without building the accounting rules and checks yourself.
SEC rate limits
The SEC’s maximum request rate is currently 10 requests per second. That capacity is shared across your filing downloads, attachments, and retries. Large historical backfills can take days once you account for the number of filings, their attachments, and retries.
With Chadwin, that collection work has already happened. You can query the historical data we cover and retrieve prepared reports immediately, without waiting for a bulk download and processing job to finish before you start building.
Searching and filtering filings
Which companies reported earnings last week? The SEC’s submissions API organizes filing histories by company. It doesn’t provide a single query for matching reports across companies, so a market-wide question like this doesn’t have a straightforward API answer.
Chadwin brings those filing records together into a searchable dataset and keeps it current. Request last week’s 8-Ks with Item 2.02—the code for results of operations and financial condition—and you get the matching filings across companies. You can go straight from a question to the reports that answer it.
Missing and inconsistent filing metadata
Dates can be missing or inconsistent. A filing date isn’t a reporting date, and neither automatically tells you the fiscal period. Amendments can contain just the changed material. The SEC also corrects and removes filings, including duplicates and submissions made for the wrong filer.
If you simply store whatever you first receive, those problems become your customers’ problems. Chadwin checks and structures filing metadata, keeps amendments distinct, and leaves unsupported dates unavailable instead of guessing.
Processing raw filings and attachments
The main filing may only point to an attachment containing the useful information. Earnings releases are a common example: the financial tables often sit in an exhibit, not the primary 8-K.
Then there’s the document itself: bulky HTML, linked images, and tables whose headings and notes matter. Stripping the markup can lose meaning; serving it untouched leaves the processing to your application.
Chadwin cleans report HTML while preserving text, tables, links, and supported images. For current reports, we also combine the primary filing and its supported readable exhibits, with labeled sections. You can display or analyze the disclosure without assembling it yourself.
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Chadwin handles the filing searches, messy documents, metadata problems, and accounting checks so you can build with the results.
Try Chadwin and spend your time building your product instead of processing SEC filings.