SEC Filings for Humans by Meris Jensen.
After a long and sad history of the failure of the SEC to make EDGAR useful:
Rank and Filed gathers data from EDGAR, indexes it, and returns it in formats meant to help investors research, investigate and discover companies on their own. I started googling ‘How to build a website’ seven months ago. The SEC has web developers, software developers, database administrators, XBRL experts, legions of academics who specialize in SEC filings, and all this EDGAR data already cached in the cloud. The Commission’s mission is to protect investors, maintain fair, orderly and efficient markets, and facilitate capital formation. Why did I have to build this? (emphasis added)
I don’t know the answer to Meris’ question but I can tell you that Rank and Filed is an incredible resource for financial information.
And yet another demonstration that government should not manage open data. Make it available. (full stop)
I first saw this at Nathan Yau’s A human-readable explorer for SEC filings.