kvartaali

Kvartaali is a Finnish term meaning a quarter, typically referring to a three-month period within a year. In finance, administration and statistics, kvartaali denotes one of the four segments used for reporting, budgeting and performance assessment. The standard calendar kvartaali runs from January to March (Q1), April to June (Q2), July to September (Q3), and October to December (Q4). In corporate reporting, kvartaali is usually abbreviated as Q1–Q4.

In addition to time periods, the word can appear in some contexts to describe a geographic quarter or neighborhood within a town or city, but this sense is less common in modern Finnish. When discussing urban areas, Finnish speakers more often use terms such as kortteli (city block) or kaupunginosa (district). Historical or planning texts may occasionally use kvartaali to denote a subdivision of a town, but this usage is atypical in everyday language.

Related concepts include kvartiili, the statistical quartile that divides data into four equal parts. The term kvartaali is widely used in Finnish financial vocabulary and appears alongside other temporal terms such as kuukausi (month) and vuosi (year). Etymologically, kvartaali is borrowed from forms meaning quarter, with cognates in Swedish and other Germanic languages.