But that approach falls short of helping business owners gain the deep understanding they need to assess how they stack up against their industry peers, to remain competitive, and to sustain a profitable business well into the future. If you know how to dig deep, and have the right tools to do so, your business’s financial statements can provide much more than just numbers and facts—they will hold valuable insights into its health and viability, and a strategy roadmap to help guide current and future business decisions.

Performing a deep dive into your business data requires learning how to determine, interpret, and forecast important calculations and scenarios based on a number of financial, business, industry, and competitive factors. It’s not an easy task to take on alone, and it’s not always easy getting the information needed to make those accurate assessments and evaluations.

That’s why iCFO helps business owners and financial planners take their financial data well beyond face value. We created an innovative and intuitive engine that does all of the heavy lifting of a company’s financial analysis, and then we combine that with a database of more than one million private businesses across more than 2,500 industry segments—powering our benchmarking tools to help make relevant and timely industry peer comparisons and evaluations.

So, what exactly does our in-depth data and analyses look like, and how does it help business owners and financial planners? Here’s a breakdown.

Business Performance Scorecard: Analyze your business comprehensively across 15 KPIs in Liquidity, Asset Efficiency, and Profitability. Detect how your business places among the top 10%, 25%, 50%, and bottom 25% and 10% of your same-sized, regional industry peers. A Common Size Analysis is also included, allowing line-by-line financial statement comparisons to industry standards.

Business/Loan Risk: Determine whether your business could withstand an economic or business downturn, or service new debt obligations before experiencing these challenges by using innovative and more stringent methods to assess Liquidity and Profitability.

Business Valuation: Quickly gain insights into your company’s value using five commonly used valuation techniques, with comparisons against industry standards.

What-If Scenario Modeling: After detecting your business’s strengths and weaknesses in financial performance, you can begin modeling methods to improve performance in Liquidity, Cash Flow, Asset Efficiency, Profitability, and Growth. Observe the forecasted effects of operational decisions, such as:

• What impact on Cash Liquidity would I gain by reducing my Inventory or Collection Period by x-days?
• What impact would I have on Profitability if I reduced my expenses by x% or increased sales by y%?
• Would I be able to grow my business by x% and if not, what changes do I need to make in sales or expenses to achieve a more ideal Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR)?

Industry Metrics: Observe financial trends from same-sized companies in any industry across U.S. regions by State, County or Metro-area. Perform a Company Size Comparative, observing how expense and capital structures change in your industry as companies grow in size or perform a 4-year analysis to observe changes through time across each year with a Cash Flow analysis.

iCFO provides a big-picture, comprehensive look at your business financials to uncover the strengths and weaknesses that might go overlooked or undiscovered, and then uses that information to supply quick, easy-to-understand, and comprehensive analysis across vital areas of liquidity, profitability, asset efficiency, and growth. All of the business and financial analyses can be assessed on their own to evaluate specific areas of company health, or they can be combined to measure the big picture view of the current and future health and viability of a company—helping financial planners and business owners make informed decisions and prepare for the future.

Simply put, utilize iCFO to bring financial insights into your decision-making, keep your finger on the pulse of your financial performance, detect areas in need of improvement, and help quantify how operational decisions impact your bottom line. With iCFO, you remain aware of how your company compares against your industry peers or competitors, helping ensure performance is where you need to be to succeed.

With the insights gained, you can confidently make informed decisions geared towards saving money, improving cash flow and liquidity, ensuring your assets are most productive, and that your company is edging towards the top 10% of your peers in profitability. Know what good looks like, and strive to achieve it!