Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortization is operating income excluding depreciation and amortization. If this item is N/A, we add back depreciation and amortization to operating income to come up with EBITDA.
Our data provider may make a distinction for certain stocks between EBITDA and operating income before depreciation and amortization. In particular, there are some things that may or may not be reported as operational expenses. For example, in reporting EBITDA, our data provider may remove idle plant or moving expense from operating income regardless of where on the income statement a company reports them. We ignore those exceptions and simply use operating income before depreciation and amortization as EBITDA.
Users should also consider whether the effects of depreciation will muddy an estimate of operating income. This would be the primary reason for using EBITDA rather than one of the other options.