Website www.sageworks.com | Founded 1998 | |
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Industry Computer Software and Information Technology Key people Brian Hamilton, Chairman
Scott Ogle, CEO Headquarters North Carolina, United States Founders Sarah Tourville, Brian Hamilton Profiles | ||
Fdic community financial institution lending forum brian hamilton ceo of sageworks 5 3 12
Sageworks is a private company headquartered in Raleigh, North Carolina. It provides financial analysis software. It collects financial information on the private sector by aggregating data from large accounting firms. The company also publishes "private company indicator" reports, which analyze activity and profitability in certain market segments.
Contents
Corporate history
Sageworks was founded in 1998 by computer programmer, Sarah Tourville and serial entrepreneur, Brian Hamilton. They spent two years developing the software, before releasing Sageworks' Financial Information into Narrative Data (FIND) product, which is now part of ProfitCents. Initially the product did not sell well and the founders did not know who to market it to. CitiBank and Intuit were both early adopters.
Its second location was subsequently opened in New York City. Scott Ogle was named chief executive officer in 2013.
Sageworks started in 2000 and collected data widely for financial statement years from 2001 on. By 2009, it could share financial statement data from more than 95,000 firms for one or more financial statements dated 2001-2007, including three or more consecutive years of pre-2008 financial statement data for 32,204. At a later date, it included some 2001-2011 data from almost 240,000 private firms, including three or more consecutive years of financial data for each of 99,040. This compares to multi-year data from 2001-2011 being available for just 4,360 public U.S. firms.
By 2007 it had $9.7 million in revenues and was on Inc. Magazine's list of fastest growing companies.
Data
Sageworks provides financial performance data on private companies based on their income statements and balance sheets. The data is provided by large accounting firms that work with private companies, then anonymized by labeling each company with a unique identifier number. Commercial users are given access to aggregated data by industry and region and not the financials of individual companies. Its data tends to be from larger private firms, who use the larger accounting firms that provide data to Sageworks. As of 2014, it contained data on almost 240,000 private companies.
Sageworks' data has been used by academics to analyze economics using data from private companies, whereas traditionally only a very small data-set of about 4,000 public companies that publicly reported their data was available. According to a paper from researchers with New York University and Harvard Business School, Sageworks' data is especially useful, because it is free of survivor bias and other selection biases.
Analyzing Sageworks' data, academics found that private firms tend to keep less cash as a percentage of assets than public firms, that private firms make more investments in fixed assets and are more financially leveraged than public firms, in their sample;
Publishing
Sageworks also uses this data to create the "Sageworks private company indicator", which shows private-company sales growth and profit margins. It also occasionally issues aggregate information about average profitability of private firms in various industries, which is sometimes reported more widely in the business press.
Operations
Sageworks and its cofounder, Hamilton, started a program called Inmates to Entrepreneurs in 2008, that encourages prison inmates to start their own business in sectors like home cleaning, care detailing, landscaping and being a barber.