WRDS: Wharton Research Data Services: Compustat Basics

WRDS use is restricted to authorized UST faculty, staff, and students. Commercial use is not permitted.

Current Students, Faculty, and Staff Access Only:

Hit the "Register" link in the top menu bar and submit a request for your individual username and password to access WRDS.  The request will be sent to the WRDS administrators at St Thomas for review.  We will process your request upon receipt.

1. Go to http://wrds.wharton.upenn.edu
2. Below the login box, click "Register for a WRDS account".
3. Fill out the account request form.
4. Click "Register".
5. Your request will be processed within a couple of days.

Note: WRDS is instituting Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) beginning at the end of November 2022. You will need to verify your email, register for a new account with Duo Security, and then decide whether to use their mobile app or the web interface to do the two-factor authentication. You will know when you need to register a device for two-factor authentication if, when you log in to WRDS, a message appears alerting you that you need to enroll. | 2FA Instructions

Once you have registered for access to WRDS using the instructions on this page, access Compustat and its user guides using the links below. 

Compustat North America: This Standard & Poor's product provides more than 300 annual and 100 quarterly Income Statement, Balance Sheet, Statement of Cash Flows, and supplemental data items on more than 24,000 publicly held companies.

COMPUSTAT/ ExecuComp: Executive Compensation data.

Note: Some of the Compustat data has been reorganized to reflect a quarterly-to-monthly change in publication times for some of the data.  This will not affect online queries, but may affect some shortcuts, etc, utilized by regular users.  See the note on the CompuStat page for more information.  

Here are the basic steps for starting a search within WRDS

	Go to the Home tab Select Compustat from the Current Subscriptions
	Select the dataset you are interested in.  We'll start with  North America - Simplified Financial Statement Extract.
	Complete your query on this screen. Start with dates, then move down the menu of variables. Use Code Lookup to find the proper company codes.

Some helpful hints: 

• Don't make your search too narrow. 
• It's best practice to download the data in XML Excel file format. 
• Did you search for multiple companies? The results won't be side-by-side; they'll be bunched together vertically.