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Why a company's numbers differ from one site to the next
Last updated: October 7, 2026
Look up one company on three finance sites and you can get three different figures for its debt, its free cash flow, even its revenue. Usually nobody is wrong. Each site is answering a slightly different question.
Here are the eight reasons we see most, and for each one, what Leftagraph does.
1. They are not showing the same twelve months
A company's year doesn't have to end in December. Apple's ends in late September. Microsoft's ends in June. So "2025" can mean three things:
- The fiscal year: the company's own year, as it reports it.
- The calendar year: January to December, pieced together from quarters.
- The trailing twelve months: the last four quarters, whenever they ended.
Leftagraph: the company's own fiscal years and quarters, each named by the month it ended.
2. One shows the first version, another the corrected one
Companies revise earlier numbers. They change an accounting method, split off a division, or fix an error, and then report the old period again in a later filing. One site keeps the figure as first reported. Another replaces it.
Leftagraph: the most recently filed version of each period.
3. Same name, different sum
Many popular figures are not in any filing. Somebody builds them, and the recipes vary:
- Free cash flow. Most start with operating cash flow minus capital spending. Some then take off more, such as acquisitions or payments to staff in shares.
- Debt. With or without what the company owes on its leases.
- Cash. With or without investments the company plans to hold for years.
- Earnings per share. Basic, or diluted for shares that could still be issued.
Apple shows how much the recipe matters. It holds a large amount in long-term securities. A site that counts those as cash shows a much stronger cash position than one that doesn't. We don't count them, so our net cash figure for Apple is lower than the one Apple quotes in its own results.
See it on a real company Apple: liquid cash, long-term investments, total debt and net cash Open the chart →Leftagraph: every recipe is published. See free cash flow, total debt and liquid cash. There is more on the cash and debt choices in net cash vs net debt.
4. The company's "adjusted" figure, or the official one
Alongside the figures the accounting rules require, most companies publish their own versions with certain costs left out. They go by names like "adjusted earnings" or "non-GAAP". News headlines often quote those. Sites built on SEC data show the official ones. Both are real, and they are not the same number.
Leftagraph: the official figures only, as tagged in the company's SEC filings.
5. One template for thousands of companies
No two companies lay out their statements the same way. A site that lets you compare them has to fit each one into a single template, and that takes judgment. Does this company's "other borrowings" line belong in debt? Is this investment short-term or long-term? Two careful sites can answer differently.
Leftagraph: we do this too, and say so. Revenue, net income, the cash flow lines, debt and cash are read from the company's own statements, line by line, with one published rule each; the other lines read a published list of SEC tags. Where we add lines up or work a figure out from its parts, the line is drawn dashed and the number is marked as calculated. See the statements as filed and numbers we calculate.
6. Stock splits
When a company splits its shares ten for one, last year's earnings per share of $20 becomes $2 on today's shares. Some sites restate the whole history. Some show what was printed at the time. A chart that mixes the two has a cliff in it that never happened.
Leftagraph: per-share figures and share counts are put on today's shares on every chart, and each number changed that way is marked split-adjusted. See stock splits.
7. Units, currency and slips
- Rounding. A filing in millions and a site in billions will disagree in the last digit.
- Currency. A foreign company's figures may be shown in its home currency on one site and converted to dollars on another.
- Slips. The data companies file with the SEC is typed up by people. Now and then a figure is tagged a thousand times too large or too small, and every site reading that data inherits it until the company corrects it.
Leftagraph: US dollars as filed, for companies reporting under US accounting rules. Most foreign companies are not covered yet.
8. One site has the new filing and another doesn't yet
In the days after a company reports, some sites have the new figures and others are still showing last quarter's.
Leftagraph: new filings are picked up from the SEC, usually within a day.
How to find out which figure is right
Go to the filing. Every figure on every site started in a report the company filed with the SEC, and those reports are free to read.
- Search the company on the SEC's EDGAR company search.
- Open the latest 10-K for a full year, or 10-Q for a quarter.
- Find the statement the figure belongs to: the income statement, the balance sheet, or the cash flow statement.
- Check the date at the top of the column, and whether the figures are in thousands or millions.
If the filing has the figure, that settles it. If the filing has no such line, the figure was built by the site showing it, and the question becomes how.
Where Leftagraph can be wrong
We read the same imperfect data as everyone else, and we make judgment calls of our own. So the chart tells you which kind of number you are looking at:
- A solid line is a figure exactly as the company filed it.
- A dashed line is one we calculated.
- A dotted stretch marked "no data" is a period where there was no figure to show. Nothing is filled in by guesswork.
The methodology page lists every line and the SEC tags it reads, and has a plain list of known limits.
Not investment advice. This page explains where numbers come from, not what to do about them. Check important figures against the company's own filings.