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Benchmarks

Compare your company's performance to other companies in the same industry on Syft

Nikhita avatar
Written by Nikhita
Updated over a week ago

Who can use this feature

Roles: Owner, Admin, Staff, with options on custom roles

Plans: Available on Plus, Advanced and Scale

Navigate to the "Analyze" > "Benchmark" tabs where you will find the "Financial" and "Activity" sub-tabs which are the two different benchmarks available on Syft.

"Benchmark" allows you to compare an entity's performance against other entities in the same industry and country - or even to different branches within a franchise. You can benchmark across the profit and loss, profit and loss ratios, balance sheet, balance sheet ratios and customers.

Syft uses its database of connected entities to surface benchmarks and related insights. All data is completely anonymized and secure. You can compare performance across 3 levels of granularity, either at the sector level, broad industry level, or precise industry level. Data is available at the varying levels of granularity to ensure that no matter what type of business you conduct, you can get a measure of comparative data. Data is only shown if there are more than 5 entities in the same level and country.

📓 Note

To see Syft's benchmarking classifications, take a look at our list here

Using Benchmark, you can immediately answer a lot of questions about how you compare to your competitors and then take actions to improve profitability.

Financial

Financial benchmarks compare financial metrics against the industry. This includes top level metrics such as income, margins and assets all the way down to cash balances and receivables/payables days. Navigate to "Financial" benchmarks by following the steps in the image below.

Each financial metric includes:

  • Your entity's value

  • The industry's value (the benchmark)

  • Variance (amount)

  • Variance (percentage)

  • Relative performance (either outperforming, ahead, similar, trailing or underperforming)

💡 Pro tip

You can compare your business to different levels of the benchmark set: either the middle 50%, the top 25% or the bottom 25%. Select a benchmark level by clicking on the dropdown highlighted in the image below.

Relative performance is based on percentile bands, banded into 20% groups, of the entire sample size of values for each metric. This means that it follows as 0-20% for the lowest band, then 20-40%, 40-60%, 60-80% and 80-100%.

Syft sorts the data set made up of the entity's value and all of the comparatives (the comparative being the set that you choose such as "Precise industry: middle 50%"). Based on where the entity's value falls in the overall sample, the relative performance is assigned. The value displayed for the comparative column is that of the median of the comparative sample set, so it falls at exactly 50%.

You can view financial and activity benchmarks in a tabular or graph format. The graph format shown below allows you to select a specific metric, from the dropdown, for measuring and comparing your entity with other businesses in your industry or for internal benchmarking. Click on the "Benchmark against" dropdown to specify this.

Activity

Activity benchmarks compare activity metrics against the industry. This includes metrics for sales, customers and products - something that is almost impossible to gather in the industry.

Each activity metric includes the same elements as the financial benchmarks:

  • Your entity's value

  • The industry's value (the benchmark)

  • Variance (amount)

  • Variance (percentage)

  • Relative performance (either outperforming, ahead, similar, behind, or underperforming)

💡 Pro tip

You can benchmark any metric on a monthly or annual basis within the global date selector. An annual basis is useful to eliminate any seasonality effects.

The Sales section in activity relates specifically to sales that are allocated to customers. If you have sales that aren't allocated to a product, they won't show up.

Internal benchmarking

Syft's database has over 120,000 entities. However, you may want to compare data internally within your organization, for example, if you have a franchise group or a large enterprise with many subsidiaries. You can compare to all the entities connected to your organization or a specific selection. Click on the "Benchmark against" dropdown to specify this.

💡 Pro tip

Intra-organizational benchmarking can be immensely useful to branches who would like to compare different branches' performance.

Benchmarking for Stripe entities

If you have connected a Stripe entity to Syft and you want to benchmark that entity against other similar entities, watch the video linked below.

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