How can actuals be different from published financials?

One could expect that, once financials results are published, estimates  for that reporting period (aka actuals) are equal to the published figures. This is actually not the case,  especially for an item like EBITDA, for two reasons:

• first, company financials on the  Infront Analytics platform are standardized to enable comparison across peers, hence  values for income statement items such as EBITDA are always different from those  published in the annual report because the calculation methodology is  different;
• second, when equity research analysts revise  their forecasting models with published values, resulting actuals most often do  not match neither the figures published by the company, nor the standardized  figures available on the Infront Analytics platform, because estimates are  calculated with a different methodology.