Historical boundary
Filing and section workflows document a nine-year searchable floor. Completeness checks apply to required filing forms for the two most recently completed years. The current year is available as filings arrive; it is not covered by the completed-year completeness check. Older filings can be returned. Their usefulness still depends on the issuer, form, document format, and the route’s materialization path. A successful query for one issuer or year is not a platform-wide coverage guarantee.Confirm the representation you need
A source document does not mean every disclosed value is normalized or comparable across issuers. Likewise, a result for one year does not establish availability for another, and a fast response does not establish that the data is current enough for a particular use.
Test the slice you will use
- Name the issuer, form family, reporting period, and representation required by the workflow.
- Run that bounded request for a small, representative set of issuers and periods, including a known difficult case where appropriate.
- For each result, record the request, retrieval time, accession number or other source identifier, returned period, units, and availability or limitation fields.
- Inspect missing, partial, and degraded results individually. Do not count an empty response as a zero value or a conclusive negative finding.
- Keep the capture with the downstream output so another reviewer can repeat the lookup against the same source selection.
Preserve the availability boundary
Store the filing accession number and URL with a filing-backed result. Preserve returned periods, provenance, capabilities, warnings, and degradation fields. When the requested evidence is unavailable, surface that state or obtain approval for a documented alternative; do not quietly replace it with a different issuer, filing, period, or data type. Market-calendar results have their own scope. Readcoverage, confidence, and statusNote together. configured_holidays identifies configured holiday coverage; weekend_only and tentative do not establish a complete local-holiday calendar.
SEC API does not claim equal data density across EDGAR, a universal real-time lag, or normalization for every exhibit and filing family. See EDGAR coverage and statistics, Freshness and source evidence, and SEC filing types and exhibits.
