Accession Number
What is it is and what it is not
Every quoted sentence on this site carries a string like this next to it:
0000063908-26-000073
It looks like an account number and most people scroll past it. It is the most useful piece of information on the line, because it is the address of one specific document, and it never changes.
What the parts mean
The string has three parts, separated by dashes.
The first ten digits identify who transmitted the filing to EDGAR. This is often not the company. Most public companies use a filing agent, and the agent's identifier is what appears here. So two filings from the same company can begin with different digits, and two filings from different companies can begin with the same ones. This part is the least interesting and the most commonly misread.
The middle two digits are the year the filing was submitted.
The last six digits are a sequence number — the nth document that transmitter submitted that year.
Together they are unique. No two filings in EDGAR share an accession number, and a filing's number is assigned at submission and never reassigned or reused.
Why it matters more than a URL
You can link to a filing with an ordinary web address, and links are fine until a site reorganizes. Accession numbers are not addresses on a website. They are identifiers in a public record, and they resolve regardless of how EDGAR's interface changes around them.
They also identify the filing, not the page. A 10-K submission is not one file. It is a package: the main document, the exhibits, the XBRL data, the cover letter. All of it shares one accession number. When you have the number, you have the whole submission, including the exhibits that most readers never open.
How to use one
The practical version: you can search an accession number directly in EDGAR's full-text search or company search, and you can construct a path to the filing index from it. EDGAR stores filings under the company's CIK with the accession number as the folder, dashes removed.
If you are given a number and want the document, that is the fastest route. If you are given a document and want the number, it is in the filing index page for that submission.
The part that matters for reading
An accession number is what makes a claim about a filing checkable by someone who did not make it.
A claim that a company said its margins expanded is one you either believe or do not. The same claim with an accession number attached is a claim you can go settle in about ninety seconds. The number tells you which document, out of the several hundred that company has filed, the sentence came from. Without it, verifying a quote means searching the company's whole filing history for a sentence you are not certain is there.
That is why every span quoted here carries one, and why a span that cannot carry one does not get quoted.
A small warning
An accession number identifies a submission, not a version of the truth. Companies amend filings. An amended 10-K is a separate submission with its own accession number, and the original stays in the record with its original number attached.
So a quote correctly attributed to an original filing can be correct and superseded at the same time. The number tells you exactly which document you are looking at. It does not tell you whether a later document changed the answer. That is a different problem, and it is the one this whole product exists to solve.