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Management Guidance is what a company said it expects, in its own words. Each observation is one guided metric for one period, carrying the value as management phrased it, the direction of the change, and the quote it was read from. Guidance comes from two documents — the 8-K earnings release and the earnings call — and is distinct from any filed financial-statement figure.
Plan: Fund · Credits: 1 per call

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What You Can Use Management Guidance For

Read what a company is currently guiding, metric by metric. See what it guided at a specific quarter. Audit exactly which document stated a figure. Pair a guided number with the commentary around it — the parsed figure and the explanation answer different halves of the question. For whether guidance moved up or down, use Guidance Changes. For the market’s expected-EPS line rather than management’s own, see Prediction Markets.

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Pick the Guidance View by the Question

Three views share the same column names, so switching between them costs nothing. view=latest returns the newest figure for each metric, whole and unpaged — one row per metric, basis and period. This is “what is it guiding now”. view=earnings_event is the default and returns one row per earnings event per metric. This is the view to count with, to chart, and to answer “what are they guiding”. view=items is the audit trail: one row per document. This is the view for “what did this specific document say”.

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Why Latest Guidance Has No Single As-Of Date

Guidance is not issued on one clock. A company guides revenue every quarter and margin once a year, so the newest revenue figure and the newest margin figure normally come from different events months apart.conference_date is therefore per row, not one date for the response, and it has to be shown beside each figure. A “current guidance” table with a single as-of date is wrong.
Take view=latest rather than the first page of another view when you want the current picture.

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How the Release and the Call Are Reconciled

A company that files an 8-K and holds a call hours later states the same figure twice. view=earnings_event has already collapsed that pair, keeping the filed figure. The release is filed text and the call is a speech transcription, and every disagreement traced so far has been the transcription. has_call and has_release say which documents existed, n_docs says how many stated the figure, and restated_identically marks a figure repeated unchanged — which is what “the company reiterated its guidance” actually means. view=items shows that same pair twice, hours apart. That is not a duplicate: it is one figure observed twice, and source_kind says which document each row is — press_release for the filed 8-K exhibit, transcript for the call. About 40% of covered companies both file and speak, so on those this view returns roughly double the rows.

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Key Management Guidance Fields

metric_key is the normalised metric — revenue, ebitda, core_eps. direction is new, raise, cut or maintain. new_value is the value as the company phrased it, for example 9% to 11%, with the previous phrasing beside it. quote is the sentence it came from. The parsed value_low, value_high and value_unit are a convenience over the phrasing, not a replacement for it. Cite the quote. value_is_band means FocusAlpha converted a verbal band by convention — “mid-single digits” to 4–6% — and the company never said those numbers. value_bound marks an open-ended range: “over $3 billion” has only a floor, so the parsed high is not a company number. On the document-level views, source_url is where the sentence came from, so the quote can be checked. On the release side it is the SEC address of the exhibit the figure was read out of. On the call side it is the vendor’s company page, not that specific call — transcript_id pins the call.

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Two Fields That Say What the Number Is Not

On the event and document views, value_not_level means the figure is not the level of the money quantity its metric_key names. Apple files “between nine and 11%” under revenue, which is a growth rate. Render it as growth, never as dollars. value_not_level_reason says which shape: name_says_growth, share_of_another_metric, or percent_under_money_key. On the same views, horizon=multi_year_target means management framed the figure as a multi-year goal, not a figure for one fiscal period. “Reach $20 billion by 2030” carries period FY30 and reads exactly like FY30 guidance; “long-term”, “per annum” and “over time” carry no period at all. Do not present a multi-year target as this year’s outlook.

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Management Guidance Date Convention

year and quarter identify the fiscal year and quarter of the earnings event, not a calendar date. period on a row is the period being guided, for example FY26. That is not the quarter the company was reporting, and the two are routinely different.

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Management Guidance Coverage

Coverage is not the same on both sides. A company can be covered through its calls, its filed releases, or both, and the filed side reaches back further than the call side.coverage.available_from in the response is measured from the data — read it there. An empty result means FocusAlpha holds neither document for that company, not that it issued no guidance.

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Management Guidance Sources

Figures are read from the company’s own filed 8-K earnings release and from the earnings call transcript. Every row keeps the sentence it came from and a link to check it against.

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Query Management Guidance

Use the guidance endpoints for one company. view selects which of the three the request goes to.
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string
required
A company_id, ticker, CIK or ISIN.
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string
default:"earnings_event"
latest, earnings_event or items.
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string
Normalised metric, for example revenue, ebitda, core_eps.
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string
new, raise, cut or maintain.
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integer
Fiscal year of the earnings event. Not accepted on view=latest.
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integer
Fiscal quarter of the earnings event, 1 to 4. Not accepted on view=latest.
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integer
default:"100"
Rows per page, between 1 and 1000. view=latest is unpaged and always returns next_cursor as null.
See also Guidance Changes for what moved, Reported Earnings Figures for what the quarter delivered on the same metric_key vocabulary, 8-K Exhibits for the release the figure was read from, Semantic Retrieval for the discussion around it, and Company Screening to find every company that raised or cut guidance in a window.