The Scenario
A partner at the firm pinged you on a Tuesday afternoon: she needs operating cash flow, capex, and free cash flow for 12 portfolio companies, last eight quarters, by Thursday. The data lives in Polygon's SEC filing database. You have 48 hours and a sheet that currently has nothing but ticker symbols in column A.
The bad version:
- Pull Polygon's cash flow endpoint for the first company, first quarter.
- Parse the response, extract operating cash flow, capex, and free cash flow, confirm whether capex is signed positive or negative in this filing, paste into the sheet.
- Discover that two companies report capex as "capitalExpenditures" and three others report it as "purchasesOfPropertyPlantAndEquipment."
- Write a normalization function, re-pull the ones you already did to apply it consistently, then realize you're on hour three and haven't touched company four.
The partner's deadline is real. The data collection problem is not where you should be spending those 48 hours.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook that reads Polygon's SEC endpoints and handles the field normalization for you. You describe the output shape; it handles the plumbing.
For each ticker in column A, pull the last 8 quarters of cash flow statement data from Polygon and write operating cash flow, capex, and free cash flow into the sheet with quarters as columns.
What You Get
- A row per ticker, with quarters as column headers (e.g., Q1 2024, Q2 2024...) and operating cash flow, capex, and free cash flow as the three sub-rows per ticker.
- Capex normalized to a consistent sign convention (negative for outflows) regardless of how each company's filing labels the field.
- Any quarter where free cash flow is derived rather than reported explicitly noted with an asterisk.
- Tickers with fewer than 8 available quarters noted at the row level.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
I need annual data, not quarterly
Fetch annual cash flow data from Polygon for the tickers in column A and write cash from operations, investing activities, and financing activities for each company into a summary comparison table.
Some companies are international and use IFRS — I need to filter to US GAAP only
For each ticker in column A, pull the last 8 quarters of cash flow data from Polygon, flag any filing that uses IFRS instead of US GAAP in a notes column, and write operating cash flow and capex for the remaining tickers only.
I want free cash flow yield — I need to join market cap data to the same table
For each ticker in column A, pull the last 4 quarters of operating cash flow and capex from Polygon, calculate free cash flow, then fetch the current market cap from Polygon and write FCF yield (annualized FCF divided by market cap) into a summary column.
Normalize to millions, flag any quarter with negative operating cash flow, sort by trailing 8Q FCF descending
For each ticker in column A, pull 8 quarters of cash flow data from Polygon, convert all figures to millions, highlight any quarter where operating cash flow is negative in orange, and sort the full output by trailing 8-quarter cumulative free cash flow descending.
One pass: data pull, unit normalization, quality flags, and sort.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook tracking portfolio companies, then ask it to pull cash flow statement data from Polygon across all your positions. See also how to pull income statements for the same peer group or treasury yield data for macro context.