User:16912 Rhiannon/Sageworks

Sageworks is a private financial information company headquartered in Raleigh, North Carolina. Founded in 1998, Sageworks provides financial analysis and risk management software, in addition to creating products for commercial lenders. 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.

History
Sageworks was founded in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1998 by serial entrepreneur Brian Hamilton and computer programmer Sarah Tourville. The two met while Hamilton was teaching at Duke University Continuing Studies in the early 1990s. Tourville, one of Hamilton's students, said she could program a financial analysis system after Hamilton said that no one has come up with a way to automate certain analyses. In the late 1990s Hamilton and Tourville spent two years developing software for what was to be known as Sageworks' Financial Information into Narrative Data (FIND), the technology behind its ProfitCents product. Initially Sageworks struggled to properly market its tools in the early 2000s. CitiBank and Intuit were both early adopters.

Sageworks has collected financial data since financial statement year 2001. By 2014, it included 2001-2011 data from nearly 240,000 private firms, including three or more consecutive years of financial data for each of 99,040. This compares to Sageworks' multi-year data from 2001-2011 of 4,360 public U.S. firms.

Sageworks announced a deal in January 2004 to license to LexisNexis its ProfitCents public product, which turns U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission data from public companies into plain-English text reports.

By 2007, Sageworks had reached $9.7 million in annual revenues when it was included on Inc. magazine's list of fastest growing companies.

Scott Ogle became chief executive officer in 2013. In 2014, Sageworks launched its LoanSage product, a platform for small business owners to get loans of up to $2 million in one day.

In 2014, Sageworks unveiled a cloud-based platform providing data on banks and credit unions to banks, investors and others in the banking industry. Sageworks Bank Information consists of data of 6,000 U.S. banks and 7,000 credit unions. Also that year it launched its CFO platform, a suite of financial analysis tools for financial executives with financial analysis, benchmarking, valuation, and industry data, and Sageworks Bank Information, a cloud-based platform with bank and credit union data.

Sageworks launched a platform in November 2016 that helps lenders provide financing for small and medium-sized businesses. Sageworks released its CashSage product in June 2017, which helps business owners analyze their cash flow.

Operations
Sageworks is a private business. It is based out of Raleigh, North Carolina. Key executives include co-founder and Chairman Brian Hamilton and CEO Scott Ogle.

Sageworks provides technologies for commercial lenders. These include software to analyze cash flow and risk management.

Sageworks also 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 comprise figures from large 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.

Publishing
Sageworks also uses data to create the "Sageworks Private Company Indicator", which shows private-company sales growth and profit margins. Sageworks also occasionally issues aggregate information about average profitability of private firms in various industries.

Inmates to Entrepreneurs
Sageworks and its co-founder, Hamilton, started a program called Inmates to Entrepreneurs in 2008. The program encourages prison inmates to start their own business. Program participants have created their own home cleaning, car detailing, landscaping, and barbering businesses, among others. The program is based on Hamilton's small business seminar, focusing on marketing, sales, customer service, accounting, finance and staffing. Participants make informal business plans and are paired with mentors.