Persitent,I use Bloomberg as a primary filter for quickly...

Persitent,

I use Bloomberg as a primary filter for quickly discerning whether or not a stock I am unfamiliar with might pass the criteria I have for investment grade businesses. Bloomber is expensive, but the data quality is extensive.

If the cursory overview via Bloomberg justifies my doing any further research on the business, I then complile historicals from FIRST PRINCIPLE by downloading Annual Reports and half-yearly profit announcements from the ASX website, and then manually inputting the individual line items of the financial statements - Profit and Loss Statement, Cash Flow and Balance Sheets - into an Excel spreadsheet.

This allows me to then conduct an array of financial diagnostics on the businesses by use of various financial formulae in Excel.

Keeping the "models" up to date simply requires inputting a single set of numbers twice a year when companies report their interim and final results. This takes around 6 or 7 minutes per company result (unless there is a bit of accounting alchemy that needs deciphering, but I like to think that' seldom the case for the sorts of companies I follow).

It normally takes me a good 4 or 6 hours to capture 10 years' of financial history (interim ad final results) for a single company from scratch.

I have been doing this for about 15 years, so I have a live database of around 200 companies (although, naturally, not all of them have financials going back that far).

It is clearly a labour intensive process but I find when I do the exercise it helps me garner a deep understanding of the financial pedigree of a business that simply looking at a data set would not do.

I am happy to send you aa pro forma example, but it sounds to me like you are interested in existing data sets and are unwilling to re-invent the wheel.

Cam