New ratios and checks in the monthly report, more about each client, reporting across every practice for Catalyst staff, and faster pages. All of it is live on the pilot.
10 November 2026: the pilot environment becomes prod, the one deployed environment (ADR-0058). This page is kept as written.
We compared our metrics with the Corporate Finance Institute's list of standard financial ratios. We already covered the ones that matter most for a small business each month (current ratio, margins, debtor, creditor and stock days, cash runway). Four were missing. They now appear in the report's financial health page, in a new Debt group and under Resilience, and they count towards the health score.
| Ratio | How it is worked out | Scored | When it is not shown |
|---|---|---|---|
| Quick ratio | Current assets less stock, divided by current liabilities | 0 at 0.5, 100 at 1.5 (liquidity) | — |
| Interest cover | Earnings before interest and tax over the last 12 months, divided by interest paid | 0 at 1×, 75 at 3×, 100 at 5× (debt) | No interest paid, or under 3 months of history |
| Debt to assets | Everything owed, divided by everything owned | 100 at 0.4, 50 at 0.7, 0 at 1.0 (debt) | — |
| Debt to equity | Money owed to banks and other lenders, divided by equity. Loans from the owners are left out, so an owner-funded business does not look over-borrowed | 100 at 0.5, 60 at 1, 0 at 2 (debt) | Equity is nil or negative |
The debt part of the health score (5%) had been shared out among the other parts because nothing measured debt. It counts again now, so health scores move after a client's next analysis. Xero's Demo Company went from 78.5 to 85.4.
Price to earnings, earnings per share and dividend yield are left out because a private business has no traded shares.
| Check | Finds | How serious |
|---|---|---|
| Low interest cover | Earnings cover interest less than 1.5 times | Worth discussing below 1.5×, material below 1.25×, urgent below 1× |
| Negative net assets | The business owes more than it owns, which matters for the Companies Act solvency and liquidity test | Material; urgent when the shortfall is a quarter or more of what is owed. A partner must approve the finding |
Funders and advisers can use both checks in their criteria.
Each client file has a Details tab. Partners and practice managers record the industry (South African SIC code), number of employees, year established, B-BBEE level, VAT registration and the share owned by black people, women and young people. Xero fills in what it knows, such as the company registration number and whether the business charges VAT, and the practice's own entry always wins. Every change is recorded with who made it and when.
Ownership by race, gender and age can be special personal information about the owners. Until counsel confirms the basis for collecting it, the pilot records it only with the practice's agreement.
Catalyst staff can now look at trends across every client of every practice, by industry, province, size and ownership, in a BI tool such as Snowflake, Power BI or Metabase. The tool signs in to the database with its own read-only login and sees:
| View | What it holds |
|---|---|
| One row per business per month | A coded reference instead of a name, the industry division, province, size and age bands, B-BBEE level, ownership bands, and every metric including the four new ratios |
| Groups | Medians by month, industry, province and turnover band. A group of fewer than five businesses is never shown |
The login cannot read names, practices, consents or anything a practice works with. When a staff member needs to know which business a coded reference belongs to, they enter it in the staff console with a reason. The lookup is recorded, and the practice's partners are told. Connection details are given to staff directly and never put on a shared page.
The Rule library lists every check the platform looks for. It now shows which funders and advisers use each check, whether they use it to include or to exclude businesses, and whether a funder can choose it when setting up their criteria. Filters show the checks in use and those no funder uses yet.
Pages had been slow. Part of the delay is distance: the pilot runs in Frankfurt, so each request from South Africa makes a round trip to Europe. Production will run in Cape Town. The rest of the delay came from the platform doing more work than it needed to, which these changes remove:
| What | Before | Now |
|---|---|---|
| Checking who is signed in | Two or three times per page | Once |
| Client file tabs | Loaded everything about the client to show the heading | Load only what the tab shows |
| Clients page with 2,000 clients | 117 ms of server work | 15 ms, nearly the same as with 20 clients |
| Long lists (notices, account classification, settings counts) | Loaded in full, then cut into pages | The database returns just the page |
| Practice logo and issued report PDFs | Downloaded every time | Kept by the browser, checked with the server first |
| Code the browser downloads | 596 kB | 561 kB, with a limit that stops it growing back |
Figures are server time measured on a test copy; on the pilot, add the trip to Frankfurt and back.