Programmatic API for downloading historical financial statements [closed]

Question

I am looking for a web API (free or available at some reasonable cost for an individual developer) to download financial statements for a given stock symbol (income statement, balance sheet and cash flow statements)

I searched on this site and found couple of useful links about stock quotes (Best/Most Comprehensive API for Stocks/Financial Data) I looked at YQL but it is limited to stock related information http://www.gummy-stuff.org/Yahoo-data.htm)

Google finance does not seem to give a programmatic api for financial statements.

Closest I could get to was http://www.mergent.com/ and they are not free:

Ideally, if the financial statement is in a "programmer friendly format", it would be terrific but I don't think that is feasible. Given that, an easy way of downloading this data is the second best option.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

The quantmod R package has functionality to pull financial statements from Google. It does this by scraping the HTML. If you'd like to give it a try, run these commands at a R prompt:

install.packages('quantmod')  # run this once to install quantmod
library(quantmod)
getFinancials("IBM")  # automatically assigns data to "IBM.f" object
viewFinancials(IBM.f,"BS","Q")  # quarterly balance sheet
viewFinancials(IBM.f,"IS","Q")  # quarterly income statement
viewFinancials(IBM.f,"CF","Q")  # quarterly cash flow statement
viewFinancials(IBM.f,"BS","A")  # annual balance sheet
viewFinancials(IBM.f,"IS","A")  # annual income statement
viewFinancials(IBM.f,"CF","A")  # annual cash flow statement