Today we have an interesting use case from Indiana University in Bloomington. Our guest interviewee, Terry Campbell, is a Clinical Professor at the Kelley School of Business.

How did Indiana University come in contact with Calcbench?

The first time I came in contact with Calcbench was when I was shown a Strategic Finance example. Then I saw Calcbench displayed at an American Accounting Association meeting and scheduled a demo. The rest is history.

What Calcbench tools do you use?

I like the comparative disclosures, the ability to run side-by-side comparisons,  previous period to previous period. It amazes me and my students that all the manual labor that we used to perform, doesn’t have to be done. 

You do a lot with experiential learning. It’s a big focus in academia now. Tell us Indiana’s program.

At the Kelley School of Business, we have an accelerated MBA program for accountants whereby students work with a company for several weeks during the second semester of their first year. The students perform comparative analysis, valuation, strategic analysis, whatever the company requests.  We dedicate several hundred hours of student time to these projects. The hallmark of the program is that students are actually working for the client during this time. 

While we have been doing this for over twenty years, over the past few years, we’ve been able to intensify the analysis and the comparative work. Calcbench has been an integral part of this. 

How does Calcbench factor into experiential learning?

We’re currently working with a startup in Vietnam in the cinnamon business. The company’s goal is to get into the food chain around the world. To get their ingredient distributed globally they need to connect into very large food manufacturing trade shows and very large multinational brokerages. We try to understand how a tiny minutia business, such as cinnamon,  might be reported. We use tools such as Google Scholar,  Statista to find the world’s largest consumers of cinnamon. Turns out Starbucks in one of them. We use Calcbench to understand the financial data of the industry sector or the companies we’re trying to target. In the case of this cinnamon company, we were able to use Calcbench to find a publicly listed brokerage out of Chicago.

What other courses have you seen Calcbench integrated into?

We demonstrate Calcbench, PowerBI, Tableau and Python in a career success skills course. It’s the beginning of the master’s program just to jumpstart everyone and let them know what they will run into and how to be prepared. The two features that we have almost 100% hit rate on are Calcbench and PowerBI. PowerBI to build planning models and Calcbench to get the data off in a comparative form.

How would you like to use Calcbench in the future?

IFRS is a great addition to Calcbench, but we often need data for European and Asian companies. For that we use Orbis to get revenue and profitability by country. In the luxury good space, where I have a lot of connections, there are a lot of private companies. We use Orbis for that as well and it would be great if the two platforms talked or connected with each other. 

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