Using Calcbench to Read Economic Trends

I saw a headline the other day linking bank lending to the economy as  a whole. It’s a fairly obvious notion, so I figured, why not check it out? Here’s a step by step for using our query tool to look at loan portfolios and how they’ve changed over the last two years. By the way, the whole exercise took me ~5 minutes.

1) First, off to the Query tool.

2)  I’m going to keep the “Whole Universe” box checked, and keep “Annual” selected.* 

3)  But I’ll change the dates to a range…ending in 2012 and starting in 2010.**

4)   Now, I add a filter to filter out companies without loans. Scroll down and select ‘Total Loans Receivable’. Then you need to add ‘>0’ to it. (So we are retrieving companies that have a loan portfolio greater than 0.)

5)   Under balance sheet items, I check ‘Total Loans Receivable’

6)    ….and finally, since we are only selecting a data item, I will export the periods in columns instead of rows. This means we will get only 1 row for each company, with 3 separate columns for each data item (one for 2012, one for 2011, & one for 2010).

Now we hit ‘EXPORT TO EXCEL’, and here it is. 852 companies returned.***

 Now, I did one cleanup operation in excel…I got rid of all companies that did not have values for all 3 years I was asking for. So that cut the results to 626 lines.

And that’s really all there was to it! And the result is….? Well, at least according to this very basic analysis, lending accelerated quite nicely in 2012 as compared to 2011, which should bode well for the economy.

*But you could do this quarterly as well, and might actually get more results back, particularly from companies that have not yet reported their FY 2012. And since we are going to be looking at a balance sheet item, ‘quarterly’ or ‘annual’ don’t make any difference

**Our calendarized years are from July to June: e.g. CY 2012 includes any fiscal year that ends on or later than 7/1/2012, and on or before 6/30/2013…so some companies have not reported cy 2012 yet.

 *** Unfortunately folks on the free trial are only going to get a limited number of rows returned, so I apologize for that. But you can still play along and see how it would work.