Where These Numbers Come From

1.1 — Why a company has to tell you anything

Meera and Arjun run Sunrise Bakery in Pune. They are made up, and we will follow their books through this whole module. Right now, nobody outside the business has any right to see their accounts. Their bank asks, and they choose what to show it.

The moment a company sells shares to the public, that changes completely. Anybody can buy a share, so anybody can become an owner — and an owner who cannot see the accounts is not really an owner. So the exchanges require a listed company to publish its numbers on a fixed timetable, in a fixed format, whether the news is good or not.

Everything on this site comes from those filings. Not from a broker's estimate, not from a news report — from the document the company itself filed and signed. That is worth knowing before anything else, because it is also the source of the oddities the rest of this chapter explains.

1.2 — What gets filed, and how often

The rules that matter are in SEBI's listing regulations. Three things arrive on three different schedules, and this single fact explains most of the confusion beginners have with company pages.

The consequence is visible on every company page on this site, and it is not a bug:

1.3 — Checked, or properly audited?

Meera's bank asks for numbers every quarter, but only really digs in once a year, at renewal time. The quarterly check is a quick look for anything obviously wrong. The annual one is the real audit — someone actually going through the books line by line. Listed companies work the same way.

Not every set of numbers has been examined to the same depth, and the filing says which.

• ▹**Limited review** — what quarterly results get. The auditor makes enquiries and analytical checks and reports whether anything came to their attention suggesting a problem. It is a lighter examination, done quickly.
• ▹**Audit** — what the annual accounts get. Substantially more work, and the auditor gives a positive opinion that the accounts present a true and fair view.

So the annual figures are the more thoroughly checked ones, and quarterly figures are occasionally restated when the audit catches something. This is a good reason to weight a run of annual numbers over a single striking quarter — a habit that pays off repeatedly in Module 2.

1.4 — The same company, two different sizes

Meera's accountant asks an odd question one afternoon: does she want the bakery's revenue to include the cafe they bought into last year, or not? She's never had to think about it before. It turns out the answer changes the number quite a lot.

This is the one that trips up almost every beginner. Open a real filing and you will often find two complete sets of numbers side by side, for exactly the same three months.

Suppose Sunrise Bakery buys 70% of a cafe down the road, and separately owns 100% of a small delivery company. Meera now has a choice about what "Sunrise Bakery's revenue" means. Just the bakery? Or the bakery plus the cafe plus the delivery arm?

• ▹**Standalone** — the parent company alone. Only the bakery. Subsidiaries appear merely as investments on the balance sheet.
• ▹**Consolidated** — the parent plus every business it controls, added together line by line. Bakery, cafe and delivery company as one entity.

For a company with no subsidiaries the two are identical. For Reliance, which owns Jio and Reliance Retail, they are not remotely identical.

Read the standalone column and you are looking at roughly half of Reliance — the refining and petrochemicals business, without the telecom and retail operations that are a large part of why anybody owns the shares.

Notice one more thing in that table. The standalone column has no line for profit attributable to non-controlling interests, and the consolidated column does — ₹2,250 crore of it. That line only exists when subsidiaries are consolidated, and chapter 2 is where it becomes important.

1.5 — How the numbers actually reach this site

Companies do not just file a PDF. Alongside it they file the same figures in XBRL — a structured, machine-readable format where every number carries a tag saying what it is.

That is what makes a site like this possible. Every figure in this module was read from a tagged filing rather than typed in by anybody, which removes the most common source of error in financial data and is why a number here can be traced back to the filing that produced it.

It also sets the limits honestly. If a company did not file a figure, we do not have it, and the page shows a dash rather than an estimate. If a company tagged something unusually, we may read it unusually. When a figure looks wrong, the filing is the thing to check — and how we build this data sets out where the extraction is known to be imperfect.

1.6 — What to carry into the next chapter

You now have the three habits that make the rest of this module easier.

1. 1.**Check the date.** Every figure belongs to a period or a moment, and the three statements do not share one.
2. 2.**Check the basis.** Consolidated or standalone changes the answer, sometimes by half.
3. 3.**Prefer annual for judgement.** Audited, and less prone to being distorted by a single unusual quarter.

Sunrise Bakery has none of these problems yet — one shop, one set of books, one owner-drawn ledger. In chapter 2 their accountant closes that ledger for the first time and produces a number Meera has been waiting all year to see.