Your figures, set beside the sector's: the partnership with ica.ro

Until now a report told you how healthy the company was in itself: liquidity, leverage, profitability, scoring. Good, but incomplete. A current ratio of 1.3 is reassuring in construction and modest in a grocery shop. An indicator only takes on meaning when you set it beside the companies in the same sector. From today, the report does exactly that.

Why the comparison matters

Banks, buyers and investors never look at a single figure. They look at it relative to the sector. A 4% margin can be excellent in distribution and weak in services. An inventory turnover of eight times a year is a lot for furniture and little for vegetables. Without the sector benchmark, any interpretation is a guess.

The trouble is that sector data is hard to assemble: you have to gather the financial statements of thousands of companies under the same CAEN code, clean them and take the average. Nobody does that by hand for a single report.

What ica.ro is and what it brings

ica.ro is our data partner. It gathers public information from the Romanian Trade Register (ONRC) and the financial statements filed with the Romanian Ministry of Finance, structures it by CAEN code and makes it available over a direct channel, between our servers. We send only the CAEN code and a few aggregate indicators of the company; we receive the sector benchmarks in return. No name, no tax identification number and no line of your trial balance leaves our systems - and the trial balance is deleted immediately after it is read anyway.

What you additionally see in the report

Position against the sector median

Every important indicator now appears with the sector median beside it, so you can see at a glance whether you are above or below comparable companies - and by how much.

Size within the sector

Where the company sits by turnover and assets relative to the rest of the CAEN code: which part of the sector ranking it occupies, rather than absolute figures with no context.

Productivity per employee

Turnover and value added divided by headcount, compared with the sector average. This is the indicator that shows most honestly whether the company is efficient or merely large.

Growth rate (CAGR)

The company's compound annual growth over several years, set beside the growth of the sector. A company growing at 8% looks fine until you learn that its sector grew by 20%.

Sector history and trend

The multi-year evolution of the sector, so you can see whether a weak result is the company's problem or the whole sector's in a hard year - and, the other way round, whether a good year was the company's merit or the tide's.

A taste in the preview, everything in the report

In the free preview we show a fragment of the sector comparison, enough to see that it exists and that it is real. The full analysis, with all the sector benchmarks on every indicator, belongs to the paid report.

What the comparison cannot do

Public data comes with a lag: the statements filed with the Ministry are, at best, from last year. The declared CAEN code does not always describe exactly what the company does, and a company with mixed activity may be compared with a sector that does not fit it perfectly. And, as everywhere, the median hides the extremes: being "at the median" in a troubled sector is not good news. The sector benchmark is context, not a verdict - exactly like the rest of the report.

Our thanks to ica.ro for access to this data. Without it, a report could only say how the company stands; with it, it can say how it stands compared with the others, which is the real question.

See a complete report, on simulated data, or upload your trial balance and see for yourself where the company sits within its sector.