Capital surplus represents an amount above the par value chosen by the company for the shares that it issued.
The lion's share of this line is generally excess paid-in capital. CompuStat's documentation says the following about what is included and excluded from this data point:
This item includes the effect of and is adjusted for:
- Capital recorded upon reorganization or re-capitalization of the company
- Donations received from stockholders
- Gain on resale or cancellation of reacquired capital stock
- installments on common stock
- Miscellaneous paid-in-capital
- Notes receivable from sale of subscription stock
- Premium on capital stock (excess over par or stated value)
- Reduction in par or stated value of capital stock
- Reserve account for shares to be repurchased (reported in the Equity section)
- Residual from conversion of a class of common into the main class
- Stock of a subsidiary held by the parent company (reported in the Equity section)
- Unrealized stock appreciation
- Deferred compensation effect when reported in the Equity section of the Balance Sheet.
This item excludes:
- Excess over par of common treasury stock, included in Treasury Stock - Total Dollar Amount
- Excess over par of nonredeemable preferred treasury stock, included in Treasury Stock - Total Dollar Amount
- Issuable stock, included in Retained Earnings
- Miscellaneous notes receivable, included in Retained Earnings
- Reserve for shares to be issued, included in Retained Earnings
In practical terms, this is the closest that we have to paid-in capital, largely because of the way that this data is reported today by companies.
Source and Availability
The data points come from SEC filings or earnings announcements of a company (click here for the line-item reference spreadsheet). Since the data is "standardized" by the data provider the exact number may not exist in the original source. The data is usually a single line-item (see the link at the end for an excel spreadsheet with details). There are two access methods: prebuilt factors and using a function syntax.
When using the function syntax you specify the historical period using parameters in parenthesis as follows:
function(offset,type[,NAHandling])
offset: 0-20 (for interim) 0-10 (for annual)
type: QTR (for interim), ANN (for annual), TTM (for trailing twelve months)
NAHandling: [FALLBACK],KEEPNA,ZERONA
For types QTR & ANN the value is taken straight out of the filing with the corresponding offset, ex: 0 is most recent, 1 is previous, etc. TTM types are computed in two ways: for income and cash flow statement values are calculated by adding four quarterly values. For balance sheet items, TTM is the average of the trailing four quarters.
The NAHandling parameter is optional and is used to control what happens in preliminary reports where many items could be missing. Preliminary reports are press releases by the company and only affect the most recent ("0") offset period. They can last several weeks and can cause false signals due to incomplete data (see "CompleteStmt" for a way to identify companies with preliminary data).
Three options are available when an NA is found in a preliminary report:
| FALLBACK | this is the default. When an NA is encountered the value is pulled from the offset "1" period. |
| KEEPNA | do nothing. NAs will be preserved, which can cause the entire expression to fail. |
| ZERONA | NAs are converted to 0 |
Pre-built factors are available for convenience and correspond to the following formula syntax:
| Period | Description | Corresponding Parameters |
| Q | Recent Quarter | (0, QTR) |
| PQ | Prior Quarter | (1, QTR) |
| PYQ | Prior Year quarter | (4, QTR) |
| TTM | Trailing Twelve Months | (0, TTM) |
| PTM | Prior Trailing Twelve Months | (4, TTM) |
| A | Recent Annual | (0, ANN) |
| PY | Prior Year | (1, ANN) |
| Gr%PQ | Growth % PQ | (0, QTR) / (1, QTR) |
| Gr%PYQ | Growth % PYQ | (0, QTR) / (4, QTR) |
| Gr%TTM | Growth % TTM | (0, TTM) / (4, TTM) |
| Gr%PQTTM | Growth % TTM 1Q Ago | (0, TTM) / (1, TTM) |
| Gr%A | Growth % Annual | (0, ANN) / (1, ANN) |
| Gr%3Y | Growth % 3 year | (0, ANN) / (3, ANN) annualized |
| Gr%5Y | Growth % 5 year | (0, ANN) / (5, ANN) annualized |
| Gr%10Y | Growth % 10 year | (0, ANN) / (10, ANN) annualized |
| RSD%ANN | RSD % 10Y of annuals |
LoopRelStdDev |
| RSD%TTM | RSD % 5Y of TTM | LoopRelStdDev ("function(CTR*2,TTM)",10,0,1,1)) |
| RegEstTTM | Regression Est 5Y | Eval(LinReg("function(CTR * 2, TTM)", 10) , EstimateY(0), NA) |
| RegGr%TTM | Regression Gr% 5Y | Eval(LinReg("function(CTR * 2, TTM)", 10) ,RegGr%(2), NA) |
| RegEstANN | Regression Est 10Y | Eval(LinReg("function(CTR, ANN)", 10) , EstimateY(0), NA) |
| RegGr%ANN | Regression Gr% 10Y | Eval(LinReg("function(CTR, ANN)", 10) ,RegGr%(1), NA) |
| %SalesQ | % of Q Sales | function(0, QTR) / Sales(0, QRT) |
| %SalesA | % of A Sales | function(0, ANN) / Sales(0, ANN) |
| %AssetQ | % of Q Assets | function(0, QTR) / AstTot(0, QRT) |
| %AssetA | % of A Assets | function(0, ANN) / AstTot(0, ANN) |
| PSQ | Per Share Q | function(0, QTR) / Shares(0, QRT) |
| PSA | Per Share A | function(0, ANN) / Shares(0, ANN) |
| 5YAvg | 5 Year Average | LoopSum("function(CTR, ANN)", 5) / 5 |
NOTE: PTM offset is 4 , not 1, since it uses interim periods
Click Here for the Line-Item Reference Spreadsheet.