We’ve seen a trend in users wanting to implement StarLifter to help track financial metrics. Here is a common list of the metrics we have seen:
- Actual Revenue vs Budget.
- Actual Gross Margin vs Budget. Gross Margin = Revenue - Cost of Sales
- Actual EBITDA vs Budget. EBITDA = Gross Margin - Operating Costs
- Working Capital.
- Return on Sales = ((EBITDA + (Tax)) / Revenue)
- Debt to Equity Ratio = Debt / Equity
- Quick Ratio = Quick Assets / Liabilities
- Accounts Receivable vs Accounts Payable.
Most of this data is likely pulled from an accounting platform; however, it’s likely that each transaction will not have the required classification to do each metric.
For instance, Cost of Sales is the sum of all Direct Costs. Let’s assume your accounting software’s transaction detail report does not have a field that can be grouped to define direct costs. To build this metric, you will need to create a Classification table that lists each Account Number and add additional fields that will be used in your sorting and grouping.
Your table could look like this:
Once you have this Classification Table, you can perform a join between the Classification Table and the Transaction Detail. Now, you’ll have the categories on each transaction that will enable your groupings.