Viewing industry benchmark results Follow

The Benchmarks tab makes it easy to compare your own forecast and actuals data to benchmark values from other businesses similar to yours.

This feature is available to LivePlan Premium users. To learn more about LivePlan Premium, please click here. 

Once you've searched for your industry in the Benchmarks tab, you'll see a results summary that looks like the one below. In this view, you can see industry averages for key profit, cash, and productivity metrics, as well as quick and current ratios: 

Note that you can see two kinds of data compared to the benchmarks: 

• Projections from the forecast you're prepared
• Actual results that you've entered from your accounting solution

What does each metric mean?

From the metrics tables, you can click through for more detail about any of the metrics. When you hover over a metric on the overview, you'll see a blue bar and the option to Click for details:

When you click, you'll open a detailed view for that metric:

The example chart above shows two values from your data:

• Your results, which comes from your accounting actuals. You'll only see this value if your business is currently running and you've imported your actuals to the Dashboard.

• Your forecast, which comes from the data you've entered into the Forecast tab.

The metric above shows how your data compares to the 3-year and 10-year averages for your industry.

If you're not sure how to read the metric, the right-hand sidebar tells you more about how LivePlan calculates the metric, what it means, and whether a higher/lower number is better or worse.

For an overview of all the available metrics, read Benchmarks metrics available in LivePlan.

Changing the time frame of the data

You can also view your benchmark data for different periods of time. This allows you to see larger data sets, and also see if your industry has any seasonal fluctuations.

Note: If you change the start date of your forecast, you'll also need to change the time frame of your Benchmarks data to match.

To access a different time frame, use the pull-down menu in the upper right corner: