Programmatic API for downloading historical financial statements

Question

Folks

I am looking for a web API (free or available at some reasonable cost for an individual developer) to download financial statements for a given stock symbol (income statement, balance sheet and cash flow statements)

I searched on this site and found couple of useful links about stock quotes (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/417453/best-most-comprehensive-api-for-stocks-financial-data) I looked at YQL but it is limited to stock related information http://www.gummy-stuff.org/Yahoo-data.htm)

Google finance does not seem to give a programmatic api for financial statements.

Closest I could get to was http://www.mergent.com/ and they are not free :)

Ideally, if the financial statement is in a "programmer friendly format", it would be terrific but I dont think that is feasible. Given that, an easy way of downloading this data is the second best option.

Any suggestions?

Thanx!

Answer 1

The quantmod R package has functionality to pull financial statements from Google. It does this by scraping the HTML. If you'd like to give it a try, run these commands at a R prompt:

install.packages('quantmod')  # run this once to install quantmod
library(quantmod)
getFinancials("IBM")  # automatically assigns data to "IBM.f" object
viewFinancials(IBM.f,"BS","Q")  # quarterly balance sheet
viewFinancials(IBM.f,"IS","Q")  # quarterly income statement
viewFinancials(IBM.f,"CF","Q")  # quarterly cash flow statement
viewFinancials(IBM.f,"BS","A")  # annual balance sheet
viewFinancials(IBM.f,"IS","A")  # annual income statement
viewFinancials(IBM.f,"CF","A")  # annual cash flow statement

Answer 2

I know that Mergent ( http://www.mergent.com/servius ) was already mentioned in the question and the comments, but I wanted to call it out in a separate answer so that others won't miss it: The Mergent APIs were specifically designed to meet these needs (specifically the Company Fundamentals API), and they actually do have free plans.