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A Taste of Restaurant Inflation Pressures

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Calcbench was feeling a bit peckish this week for insights into the macro-economic environment, so how better to pass the time then sifting through the earnings releases from restaurants to see what they had to say about inflation?  Various restaurant chains offer inflation forecasts as part of their earnings guidance. A good example of this is Darden Restaurants ($DRI). Last summer, at the end of its fiscal 2025, the company had forecast inflation for its upcoming fiscal year at 2.5 to 3 percent. By the end of its fiscal Q1 2026 in September, Darden nudged the forecast upward to 3 to 3.5 percent. Darden filed its latest earnings release this week, for its fiscal Q3 2026. It now forecasts inflation at 3.5 percent .  That led us to look for other disclosures at other restaurants. Sure enough, we found them. Texas Roadhouse ($TXRH) included inflation estimates in its 2025 full-year earnings release filed on Feb. 19. The company predicts wage and labor inflation costs of 3 to...

Prepping for Proxy Statement Data

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The 2025 earnings season is now over, which means the 2025 proxy season is about to begin. For those analysts and institutional investors who enjoy sifting through proxy data, let’s do a quick review of the data Calcbench can bring to your fingertips. For starters, you can find proxy statements for the companies you follow on our Disclosures and Footnotes Query page. Simply go to the pull-down menu on the left side of your screen, select “Proxy” from the list of choices, and the document appears. See Figure 1, below, for an example featuring Boeing ($BA). What’s in the Proxy? Proxy statements are most famous for their data about executive compensation. This is where you can see how much a company’s top executives were paid, broken down by salary, bonus, stock awards, perks, “other” compensation, and the like. Typically a company discloses compensation for the CEO, CFO, and several other “named executive officers,” or NEOs. Because these disclosures are tagged, Calcbench users can als...

Oracle: Latest Remaining Performance Obligations (RPO) and Off Balance Sheet Commitments

Oracle's AI Footprint Just Got Bigger — Calcbench Signal Remaining Performance Obligation ~$550B Q3 FY2026 — up from ~$130B at Y FY2025 Off Balance Sheet Lease Commitments ~$260B Q3 FY2026 — up from ~$45B at Y FY2025 Back in November, we wrote about Oracle's ($ORCL) AI exposure — specifically its off-balance-sheet lease commitments, which had ballooned to roughly $100 billion as of August 2025, up from a mere $411 million in 2020. That's not a typo. That's a 24,822 percent increase in five years. Then in December, we flagged that Oracle had leapt to the top of the S&P 500 for year-over-year growth in Remaining Performance Obligations — a 359 percent increase, from $99.1 billion to $455.3 billion, the single largest jump among 151 firms we tracked. Now it's March, and Oracle just filed its fiscal Q3 2026 results. Spoiler: both of those numbers have gotten even bigger. Th...

Analyzing Airline Fuel Costs These Days

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Last week the CEO of United Airlines ($UAL) warned that the war in Iran and the subsequent soaring price of oil and jet fuel will have a “meaningful” impact on the company’s financial performance this quarter.  How meaningful, exactly? That’s for financial analysts to model on their own — but Calcbench does have multiple data feeds on airline fuel costs that can help analysts build those models and evaluate what might happen next. For starters, we have an airlines industry template that tracks all the standard non-GAAP financial disclosures that airlines make. Those disclosures include fuel consumed (in gallons), average price per gallon for the period, and cost per available seat mile — all of which are heavily influenced by the cost of fuel.  You can download our airlines template from DropBox , although the template won’t work automatically unless you (a) are a Calcbench professional subscriber; and (b) have our Excel Add-In already installed. If you need help with either ...