Compustat Standardization & Data Quality

Capital IQ Compustat uses an extensive four-step process to collect and standardize fundamental company data, ensuring a high level of accuracy and delivering consistent, comparable data across companies, industries and time periods without reporting biases or data discrepancies.


Data Collection and Standardization


Transparent data is the underlying factor for producing superior company and market analysis. Our Compustat research team rigorously examines original company sources by carefully extracting financial information, removing reporting biases and reconciling data discrepancies.


Our in-depth collection process includes:

  • Alignment of data according to Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB)
  • Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) and GAAP (including IFRS) guidelines and principles
  • Using staff analysts with expertise in global accounting practices that ensure the quality of data integrated from third-party partners
  • Extracting valuable information from the financial statement notes for added insight
  • Completing comprehensive data reviews for logic, reasonability, acceptable value, data integration and trends, and performing over 14,000 system-based validity checks on annual and quarterly data sets

Companies often present their financial results in a variety of formats, making it difficult to construct parallel company comparisons on an “apples-to-apples” basis. After collecting data from a diverse set of sources, we standardize it by financial statement and by specific data item definition, preparing information that is comparable across companies, industries and time periods.

  • Compustat’s standardized data presentation makes it easier to identify companies with similar characteristics, such as capital structure and operating performance
  • By removing reporting variability and bias, our global data sets reflect the varieties of actual reporting practices used around the globe, while allowing for minimal normalization
  • The results are the highest quality fundamental and market data ready to use in your proprietary system or through many of Standard & Poor’s value-added solutions

Other Compustat Data Resources

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