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Non-GAAP Adjustments, Part II: Big Adjusters

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Today we continue our look at trends in non-GAAP reporting, based on the findings of our annual analysis of non-GAAP adjustments to net income among S&P 500 firms.  Our previous post recapped the report’s biggest findings for 2025 earnings — most notably, that adjusted net income was almost universally higher than traditional GAAP net income, but the “spread” for 2025 was lower than that for 2024. Average dollar value for each non-GAAP adjustment was also lower in 2025 than the prior year, too. Now let’s look at non-GAAP from different perspective: Which firms made the largest adjustments to net income, and for what reasons?  First, some background. Calcbench (and our invaluable partner Suffolk University) identified 2,320 adjustments to net income items among the S&P 500 for their 2025 earnings. Those adjustments totaled $271.09 billion.  We then classified each of the 2,320 adjustments into one of 11 categories: Every company adjusted net income in its own way, ...
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Special Report: Non-GAAP Adjustments in 2025

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It’s that time of year again, financial data devotees — the Calcbench Non-GAAP Reconciliations Study is here! Every spring, Calcbench and Suffolk University team up to catalog the non-GAAP adjustments to net income made by S&P 500 firms in their annual reports. We then analyze those non-GAAP adjustments by size and number to see what trends in non-GAAP reporting we can identify.  Our report for 2025 earnings is now available for download , and we have a summary of our findings here, too. We studied the 2025 annual earnings releases of the S&P 500 and identified 361 companies (72 percent of the entire S&P 500) that reported either non-GAAP net income or non-GAAP earnings per share. Within that group of 361, we then measured and classified the specific adjustments each company cited to reconcile those adjusted numbers back to “traditional” net income according to U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP). Among the 361 firms that reported non-GAAP earnings, 87 ...
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Nike’s Fancy Footwork With Tariffs

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Struggling sneaker giant Nike ($NIKE) filed its latest quarterly report this week, with margin and profit numbers that on the surface looked reasonably good. But that supposedly impressive performance — specifically, sharp jumps in gross profit, pretax income, and net income — was entirely due to Nike booking $986 million in tariff refunds! So does it really count? Let’s start with the headline numbers from the earnings release . Revenue actually fell 1.1 percent from the year-ago period, to $10.97 billion. Gross profit, however, jumped 20.7 percent thanks to a sharp decline in Nike’s cost of goods sold. Pretax income more than tripled, net income more than quadrupled. See Figure 1, below. Earnings growth like that sounds too good to be true, so we opened our Disclosure and Footnotes Query page to do a detailed reading of the earnings release — and, yep, it was. There in the earnings release, Nike included this statement about its most recent quarter (which ended on May 31, and is Ni...
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Calcbench Comment on Semi-Annual Reporting

  On May 5 the Securities and Exchange Commission unveiled a proposal to allow public companies to adopt semi-annual rather than quarterly reporting. That proposal is out for public comment until July 6.  Calcbench believes semi-annual reporting would be a serious mistake for the U.S. capital markets. Below is the full text of a comment letter we submitted to the SEC earlier this week stating that opposition. You can submit your own comments via the SEC website . To: U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission RE: Reforming Proposed Amendments to Permit Optional Semiannual Reporting by Public Companies - File Number S7-2026-15 Thank you for the opportunity to comment on the Securities and Exchange Commission's proposal to permit domestic reporting companies to file one semiannual report on Form 10-S and one annual report per fiscal year, in lieu of quarterly reports on Form 10-Q. I am writing on behalf of Calcbench, a financial data platform used by institutional and individual i...
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