Product guide

How to use Graffiti

Open accounts and reports from public filing registers free from this website, with nothing to install. A paid plan gives you more AI questions, the full set of company-record tools and a bookmarklet for filing pages on other websites. A Demo licence includes Premium features for 30 days. Graffiti keeps the accounts beside its tools as you work.

Browse filings Plans

Video tour

Explore Graffiti’s tools

Take a broader tour of trends, ratios, AI, review, the Companies House network and dark mode in the tool itself.

Quick start

Open a filing and explore it

Keep the published accounts in view while you inspect the data and check the source of each figure.

01
Open a filing
Start at Browse filings and pick a source.
- Companies House: search by company, person or number and open a set of accounts.
- SEC (US): find a company by name, ticker or CIK and open its 10-K.
- Listed companies (UK and Europe): search by name or LEI, filter by country or year end and open its annual report. Each result links back to filings.xbrl.org.
- Your own file or link: choose an iXBRL document (.xhtml, .html or .htm) or a report package (.zip, .xbri or .xbr), which your browser reads locally, and press Open file; or paste a link to a public one and press Open link. Open in the Graffiti toolbar does the same once a filing is open.
- Other websites: a paid plan adds a bookmarklet that opens iXBRL filings there.
02
Find the data you need
Use Contents to move through the accounts. Search by tag, value or period. Filter standard and company-specific tags, or show figures Graffiti found in untagged tables.
03
Choose what to do next
Inspect a tag, check the filing, review its figures, look up the company in the Company panel, ask AI a question, add notes or export the data. To report a bug or suggest a feature, open Help and choose Feedback.

Ask AI

Ask a question in plain English. Free includes one question per filing, up to 3 a day per account, with no follow-ups. Without signing in, everyone on the same internet connection, such as an office network, shares 3 a day. Paid plans add follow-up questions, relevant text from notes and accounting policies, and live web search. Filings too large for the Free limit need Basic or Premium. Your question and extracted filing data are sent to the AI providers we use when you use an AI feature.

Check and review

Validation checks the iXBRL against the XBRL specifications and applicable filing rules. Review flags figures and patterns that may need a closer look. You can ask AI to explain a finding.

Explore company records

Open the Company panel to review filing history, directors and ownership with a graph network, financial trends and ratios, and compare as many sets of accounts as you like. It works for UK companies on Companies House, US companies on the SEC and listed companies known by their LEI.

Add notes and export

Keep notes on a filing, saved to your account so they follow you to other computers, trace data back to the accounts, and export CSV, XLSX or xBRL-JSON. Notes need a free account.

Following companies

Signed in, press Follow on the Overview tab of a UK company's Company panel, or beside Save and the flag on Browse filings, to get an email when it files something new at Companies House, including director and control changes. Paid plans also get new notices in The Gazette. Choose daily or weekly emails, or turn them off, under Companies you follow on your profile page. Free follows up to 5 companies and paid plans up to 200. Every email has a one-click unsubscribe.

Reading the filing

Understand the highlights

Colours and underline styles distinguish different kinds of iXBRL content. They do not tell you whether a tag is standard or company-specific.

Highlight key

NarrativeSolid purple: tagged text, text continued elsewhere and complete fractions.
1,234Dashed green: tagged numbers other than fractions.
1,234Solid blue: untagged figures.
LinkDotted blue: the top number in a fraction and links to footnotes.
FootnoteDouble magenta: the bottom number in a fraction and footnote text.

A tag with a linked footnote keeps its usual style and also shows a † marker.

Data screen

Find and export filing data

Data has four views: Table, a sortable grid; Document, every tag as filed; xBRL-JSON; and AI-ready, the data prepared for AI questions. The table includes tagged figures and text, plus figures Graffiti found in untagged tables. Search or filter by kind of data, tag type, period, section and more. You can copy or export exact values. Under Analysis are Trends, Ratios and iXBRL validation.

Check the filing

Graffiti checks the iXBRL structure and applicable UK filing rules in your browser. When the filing's taxonomy and linkbase resources load, Graffiti can also check dimensions, calculations and other filing requirements. These include applicable XBRL 2.1 and Dimensions 1.0 checks, XBRL 2.1 and Calculations 1.1 roll-up checks, IFRS sign and formula checks, and ESEF anchoring checks. Loading those files may require network requests. Findings are sorted by severity and link to the relevant tag in the accounts where one is available.

Calculations and footnotes

Inspect calculation relationships and move between tags, continuations and footnotes without manually searching the page.

The tag panel

Click a highlighted figure to see its concept, period, unit, scale and dimensions. Where the data allows, the panel also shows the change on the prior period, View trends, Breakdown and Ratios. Losses show in red. On paid plans, an untagged figure can also show a Likely concept, a machine-learning suggestion of the tag it would carry.

Trends and ratios

Trends sets the filed figures across the years side by side, with sparklines. Ratios shows each ratio with its workings and, for UK companies, the sector median. Under the ratios, Materiality and Altman Z'' indicator gives a planning materiality starting point and a distress indicator; both are guides, not audit advice. Trends and Ratios over several years download as CSV, XLSX or JSON.

Company panel

See the company behind the accounts

The Company button shows what the public registers know about the filing's company, chosen from the identifiers in the filing. Each tab says where its data came from. Companies House data is an addition: a filing with no UK company number still shows everything else.

UK companies

Eight tabs from Companies House: Overview, Directors, Ownership, Network, Filings, Trends, Ratios and Compare to. Overview can also show Gazette notices, public contracts won, how often accounts were filed late and, for a charity, its Charity Commission record. If Companies House does not answer, Graffiti can show the last copy it kept, marked with an "As of" date.

Compare to

Add other years or other companies as columns beside the open accounts, as many as you like. For UK and US companies, Show similar companies suggests companies of the same industry and size to add. For a UK company, Among similar UK companies shows where each headline figure and ratio sits among companies of the same sector and size. Columns in another currency are converted at European Central Bank rates.

US companies

The SEC tabs cover Overview, Filings, Events, Insiders, Major holders, a Network of insiders and Compare to.

Listed companies with an LEI

A report known only by its LEI gets its GLEIF record and group, a Network of related entities, its reports on filings.xbrl.org, Events and Compare to. A company on Norway's register also gets Directors and register facts: industry, share capital, name history and status. A one-line note says why there is no Companies House data.

Review and AI

Spot figures worth checking

Validation checks the filing's structure and rules. Review flags figures and patterns that may need investigation. Results from the accounts appear first, followed by any available Companies House checks. Review opens on a short Summary, with the detail behind tabs: Findings, Figures, Validation, Benford, Filing profile and AI reports. Ratio findings show the calculation, and you can ask AI to explain a finding.

Checks

Review looks at ratios, year-on-year movements, earnings against cash, balance sheet consistency, totals that do not add up, restated prior-year figures, round numbers and tagging coverage, and lists the top movers since last year. On paid plans, it also checks Companies House for matters such as overdue filings, charges, insolvency and Gazette notices such as a winding-up petition. A digit-pattern check based on Benford's law can suggest where to look more closely; it is not evidence of a problem by itself. Some findings come from reading the filing's text: Show passage outlines the paragraph a finding is based on.

AI reports on request

Ask for a company review, going concern review, ownership analysis or anomaly report. These reports draw on the findings above and official company records where available. On paid plans, AI can also use live web search for context from standards, sector benchmarks, company websites or recent news.

Account and plans

Your account, licence and bookmarklet

You can browse and open filings without an account. A free account keeps your saved companies and filings across devices and lets you add notes. Sign in on your profile page to manage the rest.

Your licence

Enter a licence key on your profile to move your account onto a paid plan or a 30-day Demo. The plan then applies to filings you open from this website. See Plans for what each plan includes, and Help, then Usage, in Graffiti for this month's allowance.

Your bookmarklet

A paid plan gives you a bookmarklet on your profile. Drag it to your bookmarks bar, then click it on an iXBRL filing on another website to open Graffiti there.

Licences you manage

If you hold a licence for a team, Licences you manage on your profile lists who uses it. Each person signs in to their own account and enters your licence key. If you remove someone, their account returns to Free.

Privacy and access

Know when data leaves your browser

Graffiti's AI and machine-learning features send extracted filing content, from web filings and local files, to Graffiti's service, which passes what each feature needs to the AI and machine-learning service providers we use (currently including OpenAI and TypeSafe AI). We may also use it to improve Graffiti, including training models. Notes are not sent to those providers: they need an account and are saved to it, encrypted in your browser first. Do not use hosted features to submit sensitive personal data, proprietary information or anything you do not have the right to share.

Display and keyboard options

Choose light mode, dark mode, or dark mode with the filing's original colours. Navigate with the keyboard and follow visible focus indicators. Highlights use underline styles as well as colour.

No third-party code in your browser

Graffiti runs only our own code in your browser: no outside libraries, scripts, fonts or trackers. Validation, tables, ratios and trends run on your machine. AI and machine-learning features send filing content to our service, which also makes the lookups in the data sources and fetches filings and taxonomies from the web.

Notes follow your account

Notes save automatically to your Graffiti account, with the text encrypted in your browser first, and appear wherever you open the filing signed in. Notes need an account: on a demo link or Open a filing without signing in, the Notes bar asks you to sign in or create a free account. Anyone using the same browser profile can read the copy kept there.

Glossary

Common iXBRL terms

Find more terms under Help in Graffiti. You can also hover over field headings in the tag panel for definitions.

Tag: A single tagged data point, such as Turnover for one period, or a block of text such as an accounting policy. Every tag carries a concept and a context; numeric tags also carry a unit. The XBRL specification calls a tagged value a fact.
Concept: What a tag measures, named in a taxonomy: core:TurnoverRevenue, ifrs-full:Revenue. Concepts usually have a readable label and can have an accounting-standard reference.
Context: The entity, period and any dimensions that set the scope of a tag, for example whether a figure is for the group or the company alone. Two tags can use the same concept but report different amounts because their contexts differ.
Dimension and member: A way to break down tagged data, for example by business segment, geography or class of asset. The dimension names the category; the member identifies a particular part of it.
Taxonomy: The dictionary defining every concept, label and relationship for a reporting framework. UK filings generally use the FRC taxonomies (FRS 102, FRS 101, charities or UK-adopted IFRS); ESEF reports use the IFRS Taxonomy plus issuer extensions.
Standard and extension tags: Standard tags use concepts from a published taxonomy. Extension, or company-specific, tags use concepts the filer defines where no standard concept fits.
Untagged figure: A number printed in the accounts that carries no tag, so no concept, period or unit comes with it. Graffiti recovers these from the visible tables and marks them separately.
Continuation and footnote: A continuation is one narrative tag whose text is split across the document; a footnote is explanatory text attached to a figure. Graffiti moves between the parts for you.
Calculation relationships: The summation relationships in a calculation linkbase: which figures should sum to which total. Consistency allows for each figure's stated rounding (its decimals), so accounts filed in millions may legitimately differ by up to a million.
ESEF and report packages: The European Single Electronic Format used for annual reports by issuers on EU regulated markets. Reports are commonly delivered as a ZIP/XBRI/XBR package containing the iXBRL document and its taxonomy extension.
Anchoring: In ESEF, a link between an extension concept and a related standard IFRS concept. It helps people and software understand what the extension concept means.
CRN and LEI: A Company Registration Number identifies a UK company at Companies House. A Legal Entity Identifier is a global code for a legal entity involved in financial transactions. ESEF reports use LEIs, so a report may have no UK CRN or Companies House data.
Person with significant control (PSC): An individual or legal entity that owns or controls a company, typically through more than 25% of its shares or voting rights, or the right to appoint or remove a majority of the board. Companies House records PSCs separately from directors, although a person may be both.
xBRL-JSON: A JSON form of the filing's tagged data defined by the Open Information Model, with periods and dimensions resolved and values in canonical form. Recovered untagged figures are not part of xBRL-JSON. Graffiti exports it with or without its own presentation properties.

Try Graffiti

Open a set of accounts

Browse public filing registers free, or choose a plan for more AI questions, full company records and a bookmarklet for filings on other websites.

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