XBRL is the machine-readable tagging US-listed companies must apply to the financial statements in their SEC filings, so that each GAAP figure such as revenue or net income carries a standard label software can read.
Every number in the income statement, balance sheet and cash-flow statement of a Form 10-Q or Form 10-K is tagged with a concept from the US GAAP taxonomy, a period and a unit. The Securities and Exchange Commission collects the tags from every filing into a per-company dataset, the company facts, which it serves as open data. For Upwork Inc. that gives a consistent series of GAAP revenue, net income, gross profit and operating cash flow for every quarter since the 2018 IPO, each value traceable to the filing it came from, with restated values recorded alongside the originals.
The limits matter as much as the reach. XBRL covers the audited statements, not the management tables: gross services volume, active clients, GSV per active client and adjusted EBITDA are not GAAP concepts and are not tagged, so they have to be read from the text of the filing or the earnings release. And the fourth quarter is reported as a full-year value, because the 10-K has no stand-alone Q4 statement, so a quarterly series has to derive Q4 by subtracting the first three quarters from the year.
Tag names also change when a company adopts a new standard or the taxonomy is updated, so a series that reads one tag can go blank at the boundary and must fall back to the older or newer name.
How Upwork Insights uses it
The GAAP side of the Pulse page, revenue, net income, gross profit and operating cash flow, is read from the SEC's XBRL company facts for Upwork Inc.; revenue was $185.6M in Q3 2026. The marketplace metrics beside them are read from the filings' text instead. Method in methodology, section 4.