Calcbench

Our top priority at Calcbench is always to help financial analysts bring more rigor and clarity to your work. Today we want to give an example of how that can happen with a bit of analysis of our own, comparing the earnings of Microsoft ($MSFT) and Oracle ($ORCL).  We start with a quick comparison of the two tech giants’ earnings for 2024, which they both filed last summer. (That’s an important detail, we promise.) See Figure 1, below.  We can start by stating the obvious: Oracle reports adjusted, non-GAAP net income, while Microsoft doesn’t. But what if Microsoft did report non-GAAP net income? Or more precisely, what if we could estimate Microsoft’s non-GAAP net income in comparison to Oracle?  Actually you can estimate the non-GAAP net income of Microsoft, because Microsoft does report all the same expenses as Oracle; it just doesn’t report them as non-GAAP adjustments. But finding those expenses and modeling out what Microsoft’s adjusted net income could be is a b...

Homebuilder Lennar Corp. ($LEN) filed its latest quarterly report on Tuesday , giving us another opportunity to show the depth of non-financial metrics that Calcbench tracks, and which can be useful to financial analysts. Our data point du jour: the backlog of homes Lennar is scheduled to build. Lennar discloses that metric in its earnings release. For its most recent quarter, ending May 28, Lennar reported a backlog of 15,538 homes waiting to be built, with a total value of $6.5 billion. From there, we simply used our See Tag History feature to chart Lennar’s quarterly backlog for the last several years. In less than two minutes, we ended up with Figure 1, below. Fascinating, but also entirely predictable when you think about it. Demand for homes surged in the early 2020s while interest rates were at rock-bottom levels, but supply-chain disruptions thanks to the pandemic clogged construction operations at the same time. Hence we see that bulge in 2022, which Lennar has been working t...

Last month Calcbench had a post looking at major restaurant businesses and the number of locations they operate in North America. Today we have an update specifically on the number of sit-down restaurants in the North America market — because they showed a sharp decline in first-quarter 2025.  Figure 1, below, tells the tale. It charts total restaurant locations for two dozen restaurant businesses for the last eight quarters, grouped into fast-food (blue line) and sit-down (red line) categories. Note the precipitous plunge for sit-down restaurants in the first quarter of this year. (The number of sit-down locations is listed on the right-side axis.) The restaurant companies in our sit-down category include  Cava ($CAVA), Dave & Busters ($PLAY) and Darden Restaurants ($DRI), which operates the Olive Garden, Capital Grille; among others.  Long story short, the number of sit-down locations has see-sawed in a relatively narrow band for the last two years: from 12,041 ...