The Pain-point: What Market Research Tells Us

Why do analysts get different numbers from the same filing?

Re-keying is tedious, but it is not the real problem. The real problem is what people do while they re-key: they quietly decide what each line means. One in two told us the same line item is classified differently from one company to the next - a lease here, a provision there, an item that sits above the operating line in one filing and below it in another.

Each of those decisions is defensible. Together they mean two analysts can pull the identical filing and still produce two different companies - before a single ratio is computed.

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Nobody we surveyed was short of data. They were short of a shared basis to read it on.

Half the work happens before the work

Roughly half cited calendarisation - aligning mismatched fiscal years and reporting periods - as a chore they have to finish before any comparison can even begin. Add currency, add restatements, add the slow detective work of finding which note explains which number, and the “analysis” has not started yet.

What does rebuilding statements by hand cost?

The cost is not mainly the hours, though the hours are real. It is that every rebuild is private. Each analyst standardizes in their own head, in their own sheet, and the assumptions never travel with the answer. So when two numbers disagree, no one can see why - and the debate moves to who is most senior rather than which basis is right.

That is the pain-point underneath the survey. It is not access to data; the data has never been more available. It is the absence of one defensible basis everyone reads from. Rebase exists to supply exactly that - every statement standardized one way, every figure traced back to its source.

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