Fiscal period
The stretch of time a reported figure covers, which need not line up with the calendar year.
Updated 2026-07-26
Companies choose their own year end. A fiscal year can close in January, June or September, and the fourth quarter of one company overlaps the second quarter of another. Comparing "latest quarter" across companies without checking period ends compares different weather.
Tagged facts state their period explicitly: an instant for balance sheet items, a duration for flows. A figure without its period is not usable, and a figure whose period is assumed rather than read is worse.
Every figure shown here carries the period end it belongs to, and figures from different period lengths are never summed.
Related terms
5 entries- Form 10-K
- The annual report of a U.S. public company, containing audited financial statements and a description of the business.
- Form 10-Q
- The quarterly report of a U.S. public company, with unaudited financial statements.
- Observation date
- The date a value belongs to, as distinct from the date it was published or retrieved.
- US GAAP taxonomy
- The published dictionary of standard tags used for tagging U.S. financial statements, reissued each year.
- XBRL
- The tagging standard that turns figures inside a financial report into machine-readable facts.
Where this appears in the data
Written for reading the records published here. This is not a legal, tax or accounting definition, and where a jurisdiction defines the term precisely, that definition governs.