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Why use Key Figures and Benchmarks?
Key figures and benchmarks help you:
Identify where your business creates value
Spot opportunities for improvement
Assess whether your business is outperforming or underperforming the industry
Take action based on documented insight
What are Key Figures?
Key figures are concrete financial metrics that give you a clear view of your company’s performance. For example, they show:
How efficiently the business uses its assets
How much of your revenue becomes operating profit
We use the DuPont model as our framework, breaking Return on Assets (ROA) into two main areas:
Profitability (explained below)
Asset Utilisation (explained below)
The DuPont model shows you where value is created – and where it is lost.
How are the key figures connected?
Return on Assets is the overall metric, it shows how efficiently a business generates profit from its assets. The DuPont model breaks it into:
1. Profitability
Measures how much of your revenue becomes profit:
Operating profit margin, how much you earn for every unit of sales
Gross margin, what’s left after direct costs
Payroll as % of revenue, how much you spend on salaries
Revenue growth, how much your top line has grown
Cost growth, how much your expenses have increased
2. Asset Utilization
Measures how efficiently assets generate revenue:
Revenue per unit invested in total assets, sales generated per invested currency unit
Revenue per unit in fixed assets, output from “big” assets (e.g., machinery, buildings)
Revenue per unit in current assets, how well you turn short-term assets like inventory and receivables into sales
Average inventory days, how long cash is tied up in stock
Average customer payment and supplier payment days, how long cash is tied up with customers or freed via supplier credit
Why this split?
It gives you a clear view of where value is created and where it disappears. If ROA drops, you can see if the cause is falling profitability or inefficient use of assets.
How we calculate key figures
We use rolling 12-month financial data:
P&L items (like revenue and EBITDA) are summed for the year
Balance sheet items (like assets and liabilities) are averaged across the year
Example for Jan–Dec 2024:
ROA = EBITDA (Jan–Dec 2024) / Average total assets (Jan–Dec 2024)
What is a Benchmark?
Benchmarking shows how your company’s key figures compare to the average for similar businesses in the same industry. It’s a clear way to see where you’re ahead or behind the market.
We anonymize, aggregate, and optimize data from more than 17,000 companies using Crediwire to calculate benchmarks.
How do we compare?
We compare with companies sharing the first two digits of your industry classification code (DB25).
Example:
A hair salon with code 962000 is compared with businesses coded 96xxxx.
We only show benchmarks when there are at least 10 comparable companies with sufficient data.
How do we calculate benchmark averages?
We calculate key figures for each company, then take the simple average. Every company carries equal weight regardless of size.
Example:
Three companies with profit margins of 3 %, 10 %, and 10 % average 7.7 %.
A size-weighted approach would give 3.6 %, a misleading result.
How do we ensure the benchmark reflects reality?
We remove noise and errors to ensure benchmarks are accurate:
Exclude companies with incomplete bookkeeping
Remove the bottom 5 % and top 5 % outliers
Correct obvious errors (e.g., 999 days of inventory or missing costs)
Example:
A company reports revenue of 5 m with zero costs, without cleaning, it would show an unrealistically high profit.
How to read the colour codes
The colour codes give you an instant overview:
🟢 Green: Better than the industry average
🟡 Yellow: Below industry average, potential to improve
Example:
EBITDA margin 15 % vs. industry 9 % → green indicator
Have questions or want help getting started?
Call us at +45 91 54 09 65 or email info@crediwire.com.
We look forward to working with you.