How we check the numbers

Every balance sheet must satisfy Assets = Liabilities + Equity. It is not a statistic, it is double-entry bookkeeping. Each filing is checked against Assets = Liabilities + Equity when it reports the lines needed; where it does not, it is marked not testable instead of passing. A filing that does not balance has an error, either in the filing or in how we read it, and this page says which, for the filings we can test.

What the check found

6,252companies covered
5,643reconciled: balanced, or balanced once noncontrolling interests or mezzanine equity are included
194flagged with a specific reason
0silently fudged

415 more report no complete set of totals, so there is no identity to test. They are excluded rather than counted as passes.

This split is also published per sector, alongside every company in it ranked by total assets. See financials, health care, information technology, or any of the others linked from those pages.

Every flag, named

CategoryFilingsWhat it means Examples
Component not reaching us182The filer's own totals agree; a credit-side line is not reaching this site. Either tagged under a name we do not read, or not tagged at all: indistinguishable from the data we hold.AACB, AACO, ABCP
Rounding3The two sides differ by under 1% of total assets: presentation slack, not error.AEIS, EONR, GENK
Unexplained9The filer published no stated total to referee against. Under investigation.ETHV, EZBC, EZET
Genuinely broken filing0The filer's own stated total does not match their own assets. Their arithmetic, not ours.—

Why there is no percentage here

The denominator moves as we improve coverage. In one week we restored 31 companies that had been silently unreachable, and the pass rate went down, because the newly visible filings were the awkward ones. A number that falls when quality rises is not a quality measure, it is a moving target. So we publish the raw counts, and we update them as gaps close.

These figures are read from the database when this page renders. They are not copied into the page by hand, and they change when the data does.

How the accounting-identity check works

Assets = Liabilities + Equity is not a rule filers follow. It is a consequence of double-entry bookkeeping, which is exactly what makes it usable as a test on data you did not produce.

Why the number is not 100%

Because the identity is an identity, a correctly tagged filing read on the right terms satisfies it exactly. So a pass rate is not a measure of how good the data is. It means that for a small number of filings we cannot reconcile the two sides, and the honest thing is to say which and why rather than to round the number up.

Every miss is one of two things. Either the filing is not being read on the terms it was written on: their arithmetic is fine and our reading is wrong, or we failed to pull something the filing contains. A third case, the filer's own arithmetic being wrong, is possible and should be vanishingly rare for an audited public company.

The four ways a filing reconciles

Not every filing is written on A = L + E, and the ones that are not are sound filings, not failures. Each of these is a pass, counted in "reconciled" above, and the drawing names the basis it used rather than quietly adding lines together.

Plain. Assets equal liabilities plus equity as filed, with nothing to reconcile.

Noncontrolling interests. A consolidated company can report the parent's equity and the noncontrolling interest as two separate lines with no combined total. The identity that filing was written on is A = L + E + NCI, and testing A = L + E against it flags a perfectly sound filing. Where this happens the drawing says "balances as A = L + E + noncontrolling interest" and names both figures. Nothing is adjusted; the two lines are added, and you are told they were.

Mezzanine equity. Redeemable preferred stock and similar instruments sit between liabilities and equity: neither one, by design. Airlines, biotechs and companies that came public through a SPAC carry it often. Four tags are read for it: temporary equity, redeemable preferred stock, redeemable noncontrolling interest, and minority interest in an operating partnership. A filing that balances once the mezzanine line is included is reported as balancing on those terms.

Both together. A filing carrying a noncontrolling interest and a mezzanine line is tested against both, and reconciles on A = L + E + NCI + mezzanine.

The four reasons a filing is flagged

Everything that does not reconcile lands in exactly one of these, and the counts for each are in the table below.

Rounding. Figures are reported in millions. A one-unit difference on a balance sheet of a few hundred billion is eight decimal places of nothing, and a gap under a percent of total assets is treated as the noise it is.

A component not reaching us. The filing balances against its own stated total but our sum falls short, so a credit-side line is missing from what we hold. There are two ways that happens and they look identical from here: the filer tagged it under a name we do not read, or the filer did not tag it at all.

The second is commoner than it sounds. Blank-cheque acquisition companies keep almost their whole balance sheet in trust, matched on the credit side by shares subject to redemption, and a large number of them never tag that line in XBRL, so the figure exists on the rendered statement and nowhere a machine can reach. We cannot call that our bug, and we will not call it theirs either: the honest answer is that the number is not there to read.

What we will not do is close it with the trust balance, which sits on the ASSET side and matches the gap almost exactly on every one of these filings. That match is a consequence of how a SPAC is built, not evidence about the credit side, and using it would balance hundreds of filings by counting the same money twice.

Unexplained. The filer published no stated total to referee against, so there is no way to tell whose arithmetic is at fault. Recorded as unknown rather than assigned to whichever side flatters us.

A filing that genuinely does not balance. It happens. When a filer's own stated total does not match their own assets, no parser fixes that, and pretending otherwise would mean publishing a number the company never filed. The drawing shows the figures as reported, states the gap as a percentage, and says so.

How we tell them apart

Guessing which category a failure belongs to would make the whole exercise worthless. One field settles it: LiabilitiesAndEquity, the filer's own stated right-hand side. Where a company publishes it, we can ask two questions instead of one: does the filing balance against its own figures, and did we recover everything it put there?

If the filing balances against itself and our sum falls short, the missing amount is a line we did not ingest, and the fault is ours. If the filing does not balance against its own stated total, that is the filer's arithmetic. Where a company publishes no stated total, the honest answer is that we do not know, and it is recorded as unexplained rather than assigned to whichever bucket flatters us.

What we will not do

Plug the gap. A figure adjusted until the columns agree is no longer what the company filed, and what the company filed is the entire product. Every number on this site is as reported, and where the two sides do not meet you get the gap, the size of it, and the reason. Not a tidier number.