frequently asked questions

How is it all possible?

Deciphering corporate reports has always been a painstaking task. Every report challenges the analyst with information presentation, and numbers, assumptions, and formulas scattered throughout the document, which can vary from quarter to quarter and year to year for every company. And that’s before thinking about formatting, styles and corporate phraseology, which will vary from year to year, project to project, and executive to executive.

Exerica has found a way around this information chaos. It starts with structuring numerical data in tables in a specific way which takes account of the mathematical relationships between numbers. Once every number is put “in relation to” other numbers, linking all data across the report becomes much simpler.

This means Exerica extracts the full accounting structure from a company report – a solution that no one has managed to do until now. What Exerica sees is not a miasma of words and numbers but the original hierarchical structure of a company’s accounts.

The resulting data structure can then be accurately linked with like structures from any other financial report – from one company across time, to a range of companies in a market sector. Every item can be matched against the same data in other reports with exactly the same analytical and accounting meaning.

Room for error?

Exerica not only accurately structures financial data, it can also spot and fix mistakes in original reports!

If, for example, a discovered mathematical relationship works for one column in a table and not for another, then there must be something wrong with the latter. If there is an error in one or two digits Exerica can fix it. Any legible document will be processed accurately by Exerica. That said, there might be issues with poorly scanned reports.

Can you compare financials between different companies?

Exerica currently enables accurate and detailed longitudinal analysis of any one company over time. We guarantee impeccable data integrity, with our solution largely based on numerical data analysis.

The next step is comparing financials of companies from the same, or similar, economic sectors. Comparisons between companies using like measures require some linguistic analysis, which is still being refined. Beyond that however, comparing the balance sheet of, for example, a gold producer with the balance sheet of an insurance company is a more complex task which is still being worked on.

Do you only work with corporate reports? What about economic data?

We are working on this too. Exerica’s core algorithms should enable the structuring of the vast bulk of the world’s financial and economic data.

How is Exerica better than XBRL data?

XBRL is a global standard for storing and exchanging business information. Exerica is a solution that extracts, structures and stores business information in ANY user format, including XBRL if need be.

XBRL data is still prepared manually by people transcribing and tagging numbers in original company reports. This always leaves room for error. More importantly, there is a lot of financial data left outside the scope of XBRL regulatory requirements.

Finally, Exerica is not just a technology. It is also a unique user interface solution embedded into the Analyst’s environment: MS Excel and PDF viewer.

How  does the user interface work?

The Analyst stays in their natural environment, which includes MS Excel and a PDF viewer. Nothing changes in the way they do their analysis except that the Excel spreadsheet needs to connect to the Exerica database. This happens in one of two ways:

Exerica’s customised Excel formulas return the desired items to the Exerica database. They can be manipulated and analysed, the same as the parameters in any other Excel formula. An update of an existing spreadsheet for a new reporting period would literally become a simple matter of swapping cells with formulas or changing the “Date” parameter in them.

See Exerica Blog for more detail

How fast is Exerica?

How long does it take for Exerica to process a freshly published company report? Five minutes on average. The visual quality of images, and the PDF, and the length of the report are the main factors.

Can you work with any file formats?

Yes. We use optical recognition if there is no text layer available.

Can you work with non-public financial reports?

Absolutely. This is where Exerica technology would be most valuable given the lack of substitutes.

We would be happy to offer a separate data storage in a specified location for your needs. This can be managed separately from Exerica’s core database.

How much  do you cost?

Cheaper than any available substitute.