What's the difference between the data from the Company Facts and Financial Facts API?

[unparadise]

I would like to calculate the ROIC of different companies in different industries from the past 10 years.

With the Company Facts API, I am able to save the income statement and balance sheet from the past 10 years to a Pandas DataFrame and a csv or excel file. Then I read in "Choosing the Right API" that the Financial Facts API should be used for comparison across companies. However, it does not support the "periods" and "annual" parameters.

So, I was wondering what's the difference between the data retrieved using the two different APIs?

If anyone has suggestion on a better way to calculate ROIC, I'd love to hear that too.

Thank you very much for your time!

[dgunning]

For what you want just use the CompanyFacts API. The docs page is misleading/inaccurate and I will update it.

The choice is

1. If you need multi-year financials use CompanyFacts
2. If you need the latest financials e.g. 2-3 years use the XBRL API

The reason is the SEC creates company facts data series by combining the XBRL data over multiple years

[unparadise]

Thank you for the guidance, dgunning!