If your experience is like mine, it seems that many things seem to pile up this time of year. We all have to either do our own taxes or get things together for them to be done by another. As a CPA, I simply can’t bring myself to having someone do my taxes for me although I get sorely tempted at times. Anyway, that April 15th deadline will be here before we know it.

Just today, I received a question from a reader of the book with regard to the timing of financial filings on potential company investment candidates. He was looking for the most recent financial reports on companies he screened for using finviz.com. He noted today that the most recent reported data for many companies at finviz is 9/30/2013. He expected to see financial report information from 12/30/2013. He wanted to know my thoughts about the matter.

The inquiry addresses an important issue as to the timing of financial information availability relative to doing research on one’s investments. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) requires that smaller companies, the type my finviz screener tends to reveal, file each of their first three fiscal year quarterly reports (1st, 2nd, and 3rd quarters) within 45 days of the end of the respective quarter. These reports are filed as “10Q” reports. The last quarter (4th) coincides with and is a part of the annual report and the annual report must be filed with the SEC within 90 days of the end of the fiscal year. The annual report is filed as a “10K” report.

If a (smaller) company’s fiscal year ends on 12/31, it has until the end of the following March to get its financial information filed to the SEC and thereby made available to the investment community. The reason for the 90 days for the annual report (10K)  versus the 45 days for the first three quarterly reports (10Q) is that the annual report must be audited. Companies need more time to have this work completed.

So, if the company’s fiscal year ends on 12/31, it’s important to note that it probably will not file financials with the SEC until well after the fiscal year ends, possibly not getting the statements filed until the final hours of the end-of-March deadline.

So, the 12/31/2013 reports won’t be available on some of these companies for a while longer. Further, it may take several additional days for finviz to extract the financial information from the SEC 10K filings into their database.

You can find out all the information you would ever want to know about 10Qs and 10Ks by visiting the SEC’s website. It is found at sec.gov. Have a great next week and may God bless you.