First, let’s talk about the financial data fields in RISR. A three-year Profit & Loss statement and a most recent year’s Balance Sheet are being populated when you aggregate, upload, or enter data. At the bottom of this article are the list of data fields we capture in the P&L and Balance Sheet. Specifically within the P&L page, we allow (and encourage) you to enter adjustments to normalize a company's earnings. This field is treated as an “add-back” to Net Income and EBITDA for the valuations as this can better illustrate the transferrable value of a company.
Note that no matter which data entry method you choose to use, both you and the business owner will have opportunities to review and/or edit the data fields before generating a final Insights Report.
The more data the better – as in, please provide three years’ worth of P&L data. Our software can derive a more accurate valuation this way.
Now let’s cover the three ways to enter data into RISR platform:
1. QuickBooks Online integration
2. Tax Document uploader, and
3. Manual data entry
2. Tax Document Uploader: Another easy method is using our Tax Document Uploader. For the Uploader, we are using a well-known SaaS provider’s Optical Character Recognition (OCR) service to enable this feature in our platform. We rigorously tested the solution to optimize for reliable results and that all the right numbers show up in the right areas. We set a high confidence score for the OCR tech – meaning sometimes OCR is unable to positively identify a number, and thus will not use it.
For best results with the Uploader 1) use a PDF file that is straight out of a tax management software (these have the most legible numbers), 2) include only the tax return and get rid of any additional items such as cover page, D&A schedule, etc. This will expedite turnaround time when you upload the document, otherwise it might take longer than usual for our software to read through the doc and identify necessary data. Anything of less quality – i.e., a picture of a return you take with your phone, a return with written-in numbers, etc. – will potentially yield less fields being identified.
We recommend reviewing the data after submitting a tax return via our document uploader.
3. Manual data entry: If you prefer another method, you may always manually enter the data into RISR. Below are the data points you will need to fill in during your data entry process:
If you ever have additional questions, always reach out to us at help@risr.com