Methodology

Our source is the SEC EDGAR system, the official archive of company filings. We ingest the structured XBRL data that companies file inside their 10-K (annual), 10-Q (quarterly), and 20-F (foreign annual) reports, then compute derived metrics from those as-reported facts.

The key discipline is that we do not overwrite what a company reported. A figure shown on Beat Index is the figure in the filing, mapped from the exact XBRL tag the company used. Derived ratios (margins, returns, coverage, the cash conversion cycle) are computed from those reported figures using standard formulae, not vendor models. Where a value is structurally absent from a filing (for example, a bank does not report a cash conversion cycle), we leave it blank rather than estimate it.

On every company page, the source line names the exact filing and period the numbers come from and links straight to that document on SEC EDGAR, so you can check the work yourself.

The full dashboard organises the analysis into seventeen tabs. Each one is computed from the same as-reported SEC filings:

• Momentum: Price momentum read against the fundamentals in the filings.
• Revenue & Income: Revenue growth, composition, and income trends, period by period.
• Cash Flow: Operating cash flow, free cash flow, and capital expenditure.
• Margins: Gross, operating, net, and EBITDA margin trajectory.
• Liquidity & Leverage: Current and quick ratios, debt-to-equity, and interest coverage.
• Returns: Return on equity, assets, and invested capital over time.
• Working Capital: Cash conversion cycle, DSO, DIO, and DPO efficiency.
• Intrinsic Value: Discounted-cash-flow value against your own discount rate.
• Market Multiples: What buyers have actually paid for this business, week by week, against what they pay today.
• Commitments: Lease schedules, purchase commitments, and future obligations.
• Filings: Direct links to the 10-K, 10-Q, and 20-F filings on SEC EDGAR.
• Insider: Director and officer transactions parsed from SEC Form 4.
• OBS Signals: Off-balance-sheet obligations and contingent guarantees.
• Risk: Red, amber, and green risk signals drawn from the disclosures.
• Audit: Auditor opinion, going-concern flags, and restatement history.
• Litmus: A composite health score built on primary-data inputs.
• Live Chart: Price context alongside the reported fundamentals.

A public preview of the fundamentals for each covered company is available on the Stocks pages.

Alongside the raw figures we publish a plain read of financial health across four fixed dimensions: Growth, Profitability, Cash Generation, and Balance Sheet. Each is scored red, amber, or green and shown for the most recent four quarters, so a trend is visible at a glance.

The assessment is always anchored to the most recent filing, never to a stale historical value, and the scoring inputs are the same as-reported figures described above. The colour is a starting point for your own reading of the filing, not a verdict.

Before a public company page is published, its numbers are re-performed from the source filing: we re-read the figures straight from EDGAR and confirm they match what we are about to publish. A page is only published when that check passes.

Where our as-reported figure differs from a number seen elsewhere, we keep our value, because ours is the number the company actually filed, tagged to its source. The premise throughout is simple: no vendor estimate, no black box, every fundamental figure checkable against the original filing.

A filing cannot tell you what a share costs today, so two things on the site necessarily come from elsewhere, and we would rather name them than let the claim above be read more broadly than it should be.

The Live Chart tab is a TradingView widget showing market price action. Nothing on it is ours and nothing on it comes from EDGAR. Separately, any metric that divides a filed figure by a share price, such as the price-to-earnings, price-to-sales or dividend-yield lines, needs a current quote. Where you have connected your own brokerage account, that quote comes from your connection and is shown only to you.

The distinction we hold to is this: the accounting is always as-reported and always traceable to a filing. Where a price is involved, the filed figure is still ours and still checkable; only the quote it is divided by comes from a market source.

Beat Index is built by an independent operator, not a large data vendor and not a team of badge-carrying analysts. The background behind it is in banking and investing, and the project grew out of a frustration with numbers that had been quietly adjusted, normalised, or estimated away from what a company actually reported.

We think that independence is a feature, not a gap. Because there is no house view to sell and no vendor model to defend, the standard we hold ourselves to is transparency: every fundamental figure traces to a primary SEC filing, and you are meant to check it. The authority is in the numbers and their sources, not in a title.