Financial statements are more than just columns of numbers — they tell a story about a company’s health, strategy, and risks. Today we can go far beyond scanning a printed annual report: we can turn numbers into common‑size percentages, break return on equity into its building blocks, and even use algorithms to read the tone of management’s written words. And thanks to XBRL, all of this data arrives in a machine‑readable format, ready for analysis at the click of a button.