EDGAR's advanced search reaches the full text of electronic filings since 2001, and the document it returns carries the number a post is paraphrasing. Apple's Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended 27 September 2025, filed on 31 October 2025 under accession number 0000320193-25-000079, reports total net sales of $416,161 million against $391,035 million a year earlier. The condition that decides whether a search works is knowing which form the claim would sit in.

Two dates, and only one of them is the year

The filing index shows a filing date and a period of report, and they are different fields. Apple's annual report carries a period of 27 September 2025 and a filing date of 31 October 2025, five weeks later (Form 10-K, fiscal 2025). A headline that says a company reported something "this week" is describing the filing date. The figures inside describe the period.

The accession number is the citation. Written as 0000320193-25-000079, it names one submission and never another, so a note that records it can be reopened years later without a search.

Match the claim to a form before searching

A yearly figure and a quarterly figure live in different documents. FINRA's page on using financial statements draws the line that matters most: a 10-Q is a quarterly snapshot with unaudited financial statements, while a 10-K reports a full year and its financial statements are audited. A claim about an annual result checked against a quarterly filing is a mismatch before the arithmetic starts.

EDGAR's advanced search narrows by entity, by form type, by state of incorporation and by the location of the principal executive office, which is how two companies with near-identical names get separated before anything is read. Search the phrase from the claim and the form type together, and the result set shrinks from thousands of documents to a handful.

Inside the 10-K, figures sit in named items

Every 10-K follows a fixed order of items, which is why the same figure sits in roughly the same place across companies. Three examples from Apple's fiscal 2025 filing:

Scroll sideways to see the full table →

FigureWhere it sitsValue in fiscal 2025
Total net salesItem 8, consolidated statements of operations$416,161 million
Net sales by segmentItem 7, segment operating performanceGreater China $64,377 million, down 4 percent
Services net salesItem 7 and Item 8$109,158 million

All three come from the filing itself. The route from a section number to a line item is the subject of a first pass through a 10-K.

Example: testing a growth claim against the filed number

This example uses one real filing and no assumptions. A post claims a company "doubled revenue." Apple's fiscal 2025 Form 10-K reports total net sales of $416,161 million against $391,035 million in fiscal 2024. The difference is $25,126 million. Divided by $391,035 million, that is 6.4 percent, and the filing's own table rounds it to 6 percent (Form 10-K, fiscal 2025).

Doubling would require $782,070 million. The claim fails by a factor of roughly fifteen on the growth rate, and finding that took one document and one subtraction. The same filing shows why a single company figure can still hide a mixed picture: Greater China net sales fell 4 percent in the year that the total rose 6 percent.

What the SEC does to the document, and what it does not

The company writes the 10-K. The SEC's investor bulletin on reading a 10-K states that the SEC neither writes the filing nor vouches for its accuracy; it sets the disclosure requirements, the topics every company must cover and how the information is presented. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 requires the SEC to review every public company's financial statements at least once every three years, and staff comment where disclosure looks inconsistent or thin.

The same bulletin records that the chief executive and chief financial officer certify that the filing is accurate and complete, under Sections 302 and 906, with the certifications filed as Exhibits 31 and 32 (investor bulletin). A filing is therefore evidence that a company stated a figure under those certifications, which is a narrower thing than proof that the figure is right, and the difference is the whole of source against interpretation.

Source references

Primary sources used for this guide. Follow the links for the original scope, definitions and conditions.