Structuring Databases for Financial Statements

Question

I am looking for the best way to structure my database. I have quarterly financial statements for 1000’s of companies from 1997-2012. Each company has three different state

Answer 1

I would probably go with the following structure in one data table:

Company
StatementType 
LineItem
FiscalYear
Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4

StatementType would be Income Statement, Balance Sheet or Cash Flow Statement. Line Item would be the coded/uncoded text of the item on the statement, Fiscal Year is 2012, 2011 and so on. You'd still need to make sure that Line Items are consistent across companies.

This structure would let you query for flat statement -

select
LineItem, Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4
from Data
where 
Company = 'RoyalBank'
and FiscalYear = 2012
and StatementType = 'Income Statement'

or

QoQ

select
FiscalYear,
Q1
from Data
where 
Company = 'Royal Bank'
and 
StatementType = 'Income Statement'
and
LineItem = 'Sales'
order by FiscalYear

in addition to aggregates. You'd probably want to have another table for line items with some kind of an index reference to make sure you can pull the statement back in the original order of line items.