The annual report gets the headlines, but the quarterly report is where you actually watch backlog move. Lockheed Martin's third-quarter 2020 Form 10-Q, filed in October 2020, restates the definition plainly: backlog is unfulfilled or remaining performance obligations — the sales the company expects to recognize for products and services it is contracted to deliver.
The word that does the work is "expects." Backlog is an expectation grounded in signed contracts, not a guarantee and not recognized revenue. The document says otherwise to anyone who reads it as cash: it is the queue of work the company has won and still has to perform.
Quarterly filings matter for backlog because they update the figure four times a year rather than once. Between annual 10-Ks, the 10-Q is the only primary source that tells you whether new bookings are outpacing deliveries — the direction of travel that an annual snapshot can hide.
There's a second reason the 10-Q is useful in 2020 specifically: it is where management discloses how external disruptions are affecting operations. This particular filing was prepared during a period of broad operational uncertainty, and the company used the quarterly disclosure to address impacts on results, financial position, and cash flows.
For readers tracking the Space segment or any single program, the discipline is the same every quarter: read the backlog definition, then read the segment-level figures, then ask what changed versus last quarter. The 10-Q is the primary record; we surfaced it via EdgarBeast, with the filing on sec.gov.
Bottom line: if you only ever read the annual report, you see backlog as a still photograph. The quarterly filing is the motion. For a forward-revenue indicator, motion is what you want.