Getting stock financials and analyzing them is one of the first and most critical steps for an investor to take before deciding to invest in stocks. 

The financial figures give a snapshot of the company at a particular moment in time, over a specific period, or projections for the future. 

This blog post gives you directions on how to get Canadian stock financials.

Main Types of Financial Statements

There are usually three main types of financial statements that investors need to analyze, as follows:

• Balance Sheet
• Income Statement
• Cashflow Statement

Let's discuss them one by one.

Balance Sheet

A balance sheet reports a snapshot of a company’s assets, liabilities, and shareholders’ equity at a particular point in time.

The balance sheet comprises of three components; assets, liabilities and shareholders' equity.

The following image shows Apple's Balance sheet.

Income Statement

An income statement reports a company's financial performance over a specific accounting period. The income statement comprises of revenues, expenses, gains, and losses reported by a company over a particular period. It is also called Profit and Loss (P & L) Statement.

The income statement starts with sales and then works its way down to calculating the net income, and finally Earnings Per Share (EPS). It basically gives account of how net revenue transforms into net earnings – which could either render profit or loss.

Cashflow Statement

A cashflow statement tracks the inflows and outflows of cash from operating, investing, and financing activities over a particular period.

 State of Getting Financials for Canadian Companies

To get Canadian stock financials is restrictive because investors are usually more focused on U.S. securities.

Investors do not have access to tools which are otherwise readily available to the companies listed in the American stock exchanges. Because of this, stock investors have to resort to copy-pasting financial data onto their spreadsheets. This approach wastes a lot of time and requires much effort because of the need to study and compare company behavior within and across industries.

This means that if it takes you, on average, 2 hours to get the financial statements for each company, and you look at 15 companies, you have already wasted 30 hours just preparing data.

The solution to this is to use a tool that gets you the financial data of your chosen stocks with a few clicks. One such tool is Wisesheets.

Financials from the Annual or Quarterly Financial Statements

With Wisesheets, you can get all the company’s annual or quarterly financials, key metrics, and growth metrics directly on your spreadsheet, perfectly formatted for analysis.

Better yet, you can easily compare companies across the same financials and key metrics by using the =WISE function (shown in detail here). Which works the same as any function you’ve used in Excel or Google Sheets before.

Wisesheets covers the TSX as well as 50+ other exchanges, including the following:

• XETRA (Germany)
• NSE (India)
• LSE (London)
• MCX (Russia)
• SIX (Switzerland)
• HKSE (Hong Kong)
• ASX (Australia)
• OSE (Norway)
• NYSE (USA)
• NASDAQ (USA)
• AMEX (USA)
• EURONEXT (Europe)
• INDEX

Unlike other alternatives, the price for Wisesheets is affordable, and its Excel and Google Sheets add-on is very easy to use.

Take away

Instead of wasting time, copy-pasting financial data onto your spreadsheets, you can use one of the alternatives, such as, Wisesheets, to get data for Canadian companies. As a Canadian investor, myself, I have used this tool and it is highly effective, affordable and easy to use.