Seasonal/Annual Data

I was able to upload our income statement and balance sheet.  However, I now realize that a monthly view does not fit our seasonal construction business up here in North Dakota.  Is there a way for me to upload annual information for comparison and analysis?  That would be much more helpful to us.  Our season is from March-April-May to November-December depending on the when the snow is here and how frozen the ground is!

Kaye 

Thank you, Kaye. The short answer to your question is: Yes. CFO Scoreboard will allow you to analyze only annual numbers, but we will have to do a workaround on the uploading to the software so that CFO Scoreboard thinks it is looking at monthly numbers.

Suppose your year end is Dec 31. If you upload the last 4 years of annual financial data (4 Income Statements and 4 Balance Sheets), the only change you would have to make to the upload is to rename:

  • 2012 as January 2015
  • 2013 as February 2015
  • 2014 as March 2015
  • 2015 as April 2015

Some of the “days” calculations will be off (ie, Receivable Days or Inventory Days), but you can easily ignore these few issues in this workaround. If you do not have 4 years of annual financial data to overwrite the existing data in CFO Scoreboard, you will need to create a new company, starting with a blank slate.

Now that I have answered your specific question, I am going to suggest that even though you have a seasonal business (and most business owners do), there are a huge number of optics that are available to you by looking at either monthly, year to date, trailing 12 months or annual comparative data. It is very easy to compare one time period against another using the Trends information as well the Monthly, short term and long term trend optics.

As I said, most business owners deal with some kind of seasonal issue, and virtually all CFO Scoreboard owners also have seasonal issues as well. The key is to look closely at the optics that we can provide (which are probably vastly superior to what you have historically gotten) and not discard the value because you can’t compare every March for the last 5 years (which CFO Scoreboard does not allow you to do).

Please let us know how we can best support you, Kaye.