The third-quarter earnings season is starting to wind down, giving us at MarketWatch time to look back and remind ourselves of something — just how annoying it was. That’s because of the many things companies do to make our jobs more difficult, from failing to issue a press release with a clear table of key metrics up top, to leaving out important numbers in the first release, to including far too many nonstandard, or non-GAAP, numbers.
GAAP, or generally accepted accounting principles, is a standard U.S. companies are obliged to follow. More and more companies opt to disclose their earnings in a shareholder letter, or a PDF, with lots of images and tables that don’t include comparisons with the year-earlier period, rendering them, from our perspective as journalists, almost entirely useless. As reporters are the first to process these numbers, and earnings come in fast and heavy at the peak of each quarterly earnings season, we’re hoping this article can persuade companies to spare a thought for u