About Perry Beaumont

Perry Beaumont, PhD, is a lecturer at Columbia University’s School of Professional Studies. He also works for Amazon Web Services (AWS) in Cloud Economics. At Columbia, Beaumont teaches finance classes at the post-baccalaureate/master’s degree level. A data scientist by trade, Beaumont has authored several books, including a new textbook, “Business Case Studies in Applied Data Science” in which Calcbench is featured.

The XBRL Challenge

Perry first learned of Calcbench a decade ago at the XBRL Investor Forum at Baruch College. Beaumont was sitting next to Alex Rapp, Calcbench co-founder and CTO, when Calcbench was announced as the winner of the XBRL Challenge.

Bridging academia and industry

As a professor, Beaumont is focused on building bridges between theory and practice. He uses tools such as Calcbench and Tableau to prepare his students for success in the real world.

Beaumont often teaches students through case studies; one such example is from the recent pandemic. Beaumont asks students to perform financial analysis using period-over-period performance. Students evaluate the pandemic’s effect on cash flow, inventory supply chain disruption, and more, all using Calcbench data and visuals from Tableau. Students are encouraged to show recovery time periods and go deeper into the footnotes (using the Interactive Disclosure query tool) to find information that might be hidden in the details.

In addition to the case studies, Beaumont likes to show students how to use several Calcbench features including: peer-to-peer benchmarking (through the multi-company tool) and performance measures such as the many ratios that Calcbench tracks (using our Bulk Data Query page).

Beaumont also encourages students to read Calcbench’s blog posts. He has heard from Columbia University’s School of Professional Studies alums that the knowledge gained from using Calcbench and reading the blog posts has been helpful for interviews and in the workplace.

In the future, Beaumont hopes that Calcbench will add commentary features so students will be able to take notes and write reports using Calcbench.

Parting thoughts

One thing that Beaumont wants readers to know: the support at Calcbench is amazing. Beaumont notes the platform is intuitive, but if you need guidance, it’s immediate and the team is here to help.

Calcbench and Academia

Calcbench is proud to serve a range of higher education institutions across the United States, including but not limited to: Arizona State University, Baruch College, Colorado College, Duke University, Florida State University, Indiana University, US Air Force Academy, Valdosta State University, Villanova, Wharton School of Business (at the University of Pennsylvania), and Yale University.

-30-