Income Statement number differ between websites. Where is the truth?

Question

A couple of days ago I asked about apples depreciation numbers since they are not unambiguous and somebody pointed me out to WSJ's site. But I am confused as of how the various numbers are generated on those sites.

For instance Sales/Growth over at WSJ says 259,968 :

As I was still casually browsing the income statement of apple, the number reported by WSJ I realized that this number is nowhere to be seen. Seeking Alpha for instance reports a different number 260,174:

which is coincidently the same value reported in the 10K of apple

WSJs number of 259,968 is not listed in the 10K as filed.

Is this explainable? I am asking because Seeking Alpha for instance does not note depreciation of assets at all, where as WSJ does. On the other hand WSJ reports different numbers than the 10K and other sites. Therefore I ask myself to what extent any site is a credible source for those numbers.

Answer 1

What WSJ, SeekingAlpha, and other data aggregators do is collect data from thousands of companies' financial statements and "normalize them" so that different companies are comparable, and they don't have sparse data with thousands of line items. Since companies have a good deal of flexibility (within GAAP rules) of how they report financials (e.g. what some companies call "sales" in their reports may be different for various reasons), that normalization is often inconsistent or just plain wrong. In addition, companies often restate prior financials due to business structure changes, mistakes, or changes in accounting methods, and those changes aren't always picked up by aggregators.

So the "truth" is indeed in the published SEC filings, but can (and do) change over time, which is why results pulled from aggregation sites must be taken with a grain of salt (e.g. don't build automatic trading algorithms based solely on their data).

Answer 2

The "truth" is what the companies report in their SEC filings, specifically their 10-Ks/10-Qs. It's possible that WSJ is sourcing from the 8-K earnings release, which can differ slightly from the final figure in the 10-K/10-Q. You can find Apple's SEC filings here.