Prowess is a database of the financials of Indian companies. Annual Reports of companies is the most important source of this database. For listed companies, the Prowess database contains additional data sourced from the stock exchanges. Prowess provides time-series data beginning 1989-90. The database is updated on a continuous basis.
Local installations are the most popular means of accessing the Prowess database. For this, the Prowess database is packaged into a software. The software and the database are installed on the user's computer. This local installation enables database access, provides scores of ready tabulations and has a charting facility that includes Technicals. It has tools to facilitate aggregations, set creation and peer analysis. Local installations are available as annual subscriptions.
Prowess Reports are tabulations that are designed to enable a detailed assessment of the financial performance of a company. The tabulations enable comparison over time and provided a detailed break-up of the indicators. Besides presenting the detailed time-series data, they also provided tabulations for growth analysis, ratio analysis, funds-flow analysis, peer group comparisons and industry benchmark analysis.
business-beacon.com is a pay-as-you-use website from CMIE that provides information on an array of economic and business indicators. Tabulations and charts generated from the Prowess database are available on this website. This website is updated every minute with new data as it becomes available.
We are pleased to announce the release of a substantially enhanced version of Prowess. This is Prowess, version 4, or Prowess 4, in brief. All current users of Prowess will get an automatic upgrade to this latest version at no additional cost.
A beta version of Prowess 4 was released in late March 2011. This was installed at nearly 150 subscribing sites. Responses from sites have helped in honing the final version and we are grateful to all users who participated in this effort.
Prowess 4 delivers a much larger database, greater ease-of-use and more power to the user. It brings to the user, CMIE's expertise in analysing companies and in using large databases to draw meaningful inferences. It strives to meet CMIE's mission, which is to help the user take informed decisions.
Prowess 4 is a substantial enhancement compared to the earlier version on four major counts. These are described briefly below:
Larger database
Prowess is the largest database on the performance of Indian companies. Prowess 4 builds on this position and brings in greater granularity of data. Data based on the financial statements of companies has been enhanced very substantially in Prowess 4. There are 2432 datafields based on financial statements compared to 1547 earlier.
Prowess 4 also brings quarterly balance sheets of listed companies, disclosures by companies under the various Accounting Standards as directed by the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India, disclosures mandated by the Reserve Bank of India for banks and other finance companies, secondary markets data on corporate bonds and on futures prices. Prowess 4 also delivers extracts from the Annual Reports in pdf format. Prowess 4 lays greater emphasis on data relating to governance.
Easier interface for benchmarking and peer-comparisons
The Report Viewer and Chart Plotter have been enhanced substantially. The Report Viewer delivers tabulations that reflect CMIE's expertise in analysing the data. The new Report Viewer now facilitates an easy switch from tabulations presented in value (such as Rs.million) to growth rates or to indexed values. Similar toggles allow a switch between stand-alone and consolidated financial statements.
The Report Viewer facilitates an easy comparison of the performance of a company to its industry bench-marks. Prowess 4 automatically generates the appropriate benchmarks. Similarly, it automatically finds peers and enables comparison of a target company with its peers.
The Chart Plotter continues to provide Technicals charts. Besides, it also permits the user to plot charts on any indicator including multiple financial data.
In Prowess 4, the user can combine the Report Viewer and the Chart Plotter into one display, or make several combinations of these two.
Greater focus on Workspaces
The Prowess 4 user-interface highlights the seven workspaces - Query Builder, Output Sheet, Worksheet, Report Viewer, Chart Plotter, Aggregates & Averages and Notes. Each of these is a highly specialised work area.
The Query Builder is a powerful datamining tool, the Output Sheet facilitates iterative querying (filtering), the Worksheet provides superior formating of presentations that have more than two dimensions, the Report Viewer is an easy-to-use system to analyse a company's performance and the Chart Plotter is an interactive Technicals and other charting tool. The Aggregates & Averages workspace packs algorithmic sophistication to aggregate financial accounting data and the notes workspace stores the user's views.
Prowess integrates all of these specialised workspaces seamlessly. It also allows the user to gain the maximum benefits from each individually.
Superior service
Prowess 4 is supported through a website, prowess.cmie.com. This site contains copious details of the coverage, contents, features, etc. It is the regularly updated on-line manual for usage. It includes explanations on hundreds of features of Prowess 4, a comprehensive data dictionary and scores of demonstrations.
Prowess 4 will be supported through an on-line help facility on this prowess.cmie.com. This is the Seek Clarifications facility. Users may post their queries regarding the use of Prowess here. CMIE will revert with a reply within 24 hours.
With the release of Prowess 4, CMIE will stop installing Prowess version 3.1 that has been in use till now. All current subscribers will be upgraded to Prowess 4. Further, support to Prowess 3.1 will be phased out over the next few months.
Mahesh Vyas mahesh@cmie.com
A database from an independent institution
Prowess is a product of a completely independent organisation. The Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy Pvt Ltd, the owner of the Prowess database, is a private research organisation.
