Tuesday, February 28, 2017

Calcbench is happy to announced a revamped Segments, Rollforwards, and Breakouts page, with a more intuitive interface and faster data retrieval so subscribers can dive into the details that much more quickly.

You now can select a peer group (how? we’ve covered that in previous posts) and then view a long list of segment reporting choices from a new pull-down menu. Once you select a choice, the data automatically appears on your screen and is ready for whatever analysis you want to do.

Let’s walk you through it.

First, when you arrive at the Segments page, you’ll be asked to choose companies, based on the Choose Companies button at the upper-left portion of your screen. We used the “whole universe” option as a default, which gives you this:

Note the “Data Set” menu, circled above in blue. Activate that menu, and you see these choices below:

Those are your segment and breakout options. Choose whichever option you like, and the data will automatically appear on your screen, applied to whatever peer group you chose. You’ll see something like this, below:

For this example, we chose to see geographic segments for the S&P 500. Since the first company in the S&P 500 when listed alphabetically is 3M Corp., we can see the geographic reporting for 3M. (But trust us, if we could scroll down this image above we’d see all the other companies and their geographic segment reporting as well.)

A few other points worth mentioning: Yes, you can also filter the results by year and by annual or quarterly filing (as you can do with most of our data results), by adjusting the date range settings in the upper-right corner of your screen.

You can also refine results within segments by looking atop that second column that says “Segment.” For example, in our geographic search above, you could enter “China” into the text field and view only companies reporting segmented results for China—or Mexico, or Europe, or Asia, or whatever you want to try.

We should also add a caveat here that not all companies report segments in the same way, especially with geography. One company might report “China” and mean the whole nation; another might report China and Hong Kong separately; others might report “Asia excluding Japan” or “Far East.” Likewise, some might report “Mexico” while others report “Latin America,” with Mexico included.

How do you sort out what each company means? With patience. You can use our Interactive Footnotes page to dive into specific disclosures, and that will often give you the answer you need—but you’ll still need to research details like that one company at a time.

And just so we don’t dwell too much on geographic segments as an example, here is another. We searched for debt instruments among the Dow Jones Industrial average for 2016, and the results are below. Again, because 3M appears first in the DJIA, we can only see 3M’s debt instruments—but the format is the same. You can refine results by instrument, perhaps searching for, say, instruments due in “2021” or those with “fixed” rate. Really, it’s up to you.

As always, Calcbench is happy to hear feedback from customers on this new project or anything else. We’re here to make subscribers’ data analysis faster and easier, so send suggestions to info@calcbench.com anytime you have one.


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