Why I built Before Invest

I'm a retail investor, interested in the market, but never to the point of digging deep into each company's financials. A little over a year ago, I picked up a book on fundamental analysis, looking to take my investing a step further. Somewhere in the first chapters, there was a quote attributed to Warren Buffett:

"You have to understand accounting and you have to understand the nuances of accounting. It's the language of business... unless you are willing to put in the effort to learn accounting (how to read and interpret financial statements), you really shouldn't select stocks yourself."

That stuck with me. I started looking into how to actually read financial statements, and quickly realized the data for US-listed companies was all publicly available on the SEC's EDGAR database. But applying even basic fundamental analysis across several companies meant opening dozens of tabs, doing calculations by hand, and keeping track of everything in a spreadsheet. That wasn't going to work long-term.

I also noticed that the existing sites presenting company financials all looked identical: the same table structure regardless of the company, the same pre-selected line items. That felt wrong to me. Financial statements are supposed to be a window into a specific company's financial life. Flattening everything into a generic template loses exactly the granularity that makes them interesting.

As a software developer by trade, I decided to build the tool I couldn't find. I spent over a year engineering a custom engine to pull data directly from the XBRL documents companies file with the SEC: filings since 2010, every line item preserved exactly as reported, in tables that reflect the actual structure of each business. No opaque aggregation.

Investing real money on the basis of these numbers means you need to be able to trust them. So every figure in every table links back to its source filing, and every ratio exposes its exact formula. I've put every effort into making the data as accurate as possible, but given the scale and the diversity of reporting styles across thousands of filings, errors cannot be entirely ruled out. At least here, they are detectable.

And this is only the beginning. The site you see today is only a fraction of the tool I envisioned when I set out. I still have many ideas to bring to life, all meant to help understand a company as a whole before investing in it. Above all, I'm building it for you, and I'd like to shape what comes next together. Missing a feature? Get in touch.