Compustat Tutorial



 
Standard & Poor's Compustat ("Research Insight") program allows you to access the North America database that provides the annual and quarterly income statement, balance sheet, statement of CBAh flows, and supplemental data items on most publicly held companies in the U.S. and Canada. The Compustat financial and business data service contains financial data in the form of company reports, performance graphs and charts, and textual documents. Compustat data reports are also available for download into a variety of Microsoft Excel templates, and much of the data obtained from Compustat's Research Insight application is intended for further manipulation in Excel or statistical packages such as SPSS/SAS.

Compustat's financial data items are collected from a wide variety of sources including: news wire services, news releases, shareholder reports, direct company contacts, and quarterly and annual documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Compustat files also contain information on aggregates, industry segments, banks, market prices, dividends, and earnings. Depending upon the data set, coverage may extend as far back as 1950 through the most recent year-end.

This brief tutorial is designed to help students use the Compustat (Research Insight) database to find the financial data needed to complete course assignments. At the end of this session, students will be able to:

  • Locate codes for companies and indexes
  • Select desired time-series
  • Generate and save a report

Research Insight is available in classroom and open computer labs in the Business Administration Building as well as in the Salmon Library computer lab. For additional information students may download "Standard & Poor's Research Insight Compustat North America: A Primer for Getting Started."
 
The "Welcome to Research Insight" window allows you to access the many functions of Research Insight.

Research Assistant wizard - allows you to search (screen) the COMPUSTAT databases for companies that meet specific criteria.
The Report and Chart Assistant wizards - allow you to create custom reports and charts.
Company Highlights - runs a company highlights report for specific companies. You can also open predefined screens, reports, charts and sets.
Library - allows you to retrieve information from textual databases.
Prices, News and Headlines - takes you to Real Time where you can have immediate access to prices, news and headlines.
    
 
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