These are raw statement figures and structural ratios rather than valuation multiples - the denominators and building blocks behind everything else in the screener. On their own they rarely tell you whether a stock is cheap. They are useful mostly as filters (size floors, positive-revenue checks) and for reading a company’s shape at a glance: how big, how leveraged, how labor-intensive, how much of its cash flow is real. All figures are trailing twelve months (TTM) unless noted.

Average Inventory

What it is: The inventory balance averaged between the start and end of the period - the smoothed input used as the denominator in Inventory Turnover and Days Of Inventory Outstanding.

Why value investors care: Mostly as an ingredient: averaging dampens seasonal distortion, since a retailer’s year-end balance after holiday sell-through looks nothing like its October peak. You rarely screen on it directly; its job is making the turnover ratios honest. For strongly seasonal businesses even the two-point average understates the true swing.

Average Payables

What it is: The accounts-payable balance averaged between the start and end of the period - the smoothed input behind Payables Turnover and Days Of Payables Outstanding.

Why value investors care: Same logic as average inventory: two snapshots averaged to approximate the balance actually carried through the year. Even in raw form, payables growing much faster than cost of goods sold is worth noticing - it is either supplier leverage or a company quietly stretching its bills.

Average Receivables

What it is: The accounts-receivable balance averaged between the start and end of the period - sales the company has booked but not yet collected, smoothed for use in Receivables Turnover and Days Of Sales Outstanding.

Why value investors care: Receivables are the bridge between the income statement and actual cash. When average receivables grow persistently faster than revenue, some of the reported growth is being lent to customers rather than earned - the raw ingredient of the DSO red flag covered in the efficiency metrics.

EBIT

What it is: EBIT stands for earnings before interest and taxes - operating profit, the closest standard figure to what the business itself earns regardless of who funds it or where it is taxed.

Why value investors care: It is the numerator of ROCE and of interest coverage, and it is Greenblatt’s preferred earnings line for exactly the reason it exists: it is capital-structure-neutral, so a leveraged firm and a debt-free one can be compared on the same footing. Unlike EBITDA, it charges the business for depreciation, which is a real cost - that alone makes it the more honest of the two for capital-intensive companies. The caveat: “operating” is a judgment call, and companies route recurring expenses into “non-operating” buckets to flatter it, so glance at what got excluded before trusting a suspiciously clean number.

Free Cash Flow Operating Cash Flow Ratio

What it is: Free cash flow divided by operating cash flow - the share of the cash generated by operations that survives capital expenditures and is genuinely spendable by owners.

Why value investors care: Above 70% is excellent conversion - a capital-light business where most operating cash becomes free cash. Below 30% is capital-hungry: the operations produce cash, but the machine eats nearly all of it before owners are paid. It is the complement of Capex To Operating Cash Flow and a fast way to sort compounders from capital treadmills in a single sortable column. One caveat: a temporarily high ratio can simply mean deferred maintenance, which is borrowing from the future without a liability appearing anywhere, so check that the good years are the norm and not the exception.

Free Cash Flow To Equity

What it is: FCFE stands for free cash flow to equity - the cash available to shareholders specifically, after the business has paid for capex and settled its flows with lenders. It is what could in principle fund dividends and buybacks this year.

Why value investors care: It is the input to an equity DCF: discount FCFE and you value the shares directly, rather than the whole enterprise. Comparing FCFE to what the company actually pays out shows how much distribution headroom exists. The net-borrowing term is also its weakness - a company can inflate a single year’s FCFE simply by borrowing, so smooth it over several years before drawing any conclusion from it.

Free Cash Flow To Firm

What it is: FCFF stands for free cash flow to firm - the cash generated for all capital providers, debt and equity together, before any financing decisions. In one sentence: FCFF is the enterprise-level cash flow discounted in an enterprise DCF, while FCFE is the shareholder-level cash flow discounted in an equity DCF.

Why value investors care: Because it ignores the capital structure, it is the right base for comparing leveraged and unleveraged firms - the cash-flow analogue of using EV instead of market cap. Value an enterprise on FCFF, subtract net debt, and you arrive at the equity. Its weakness is the tax adjustment: the notional tax on EBIT can diverge meaningfully from cash taxes actually paid, so reconcile against the cash flow statement when precision matters.

Full Time Employees

Full Time Employees — headcount reported in the latest annual filing.

What it is: The number of full-time employees the company reports in its latest annual filing - not a financial figure at all, but a measure of organizational size.

Why value investors care: Its use is context and productivity: revenue per employee separates software firms ($500k+ per head) from labor-heavy services (under $100k), and within an industry a materially higher figure usually means a structurally better model. A workforce growing much faster than revenue is a cost problem being hired into existence. The caveats are real: the figure updates only annually, is self-reported, and often excludes contractors - in gig-economy and outsourcing-heavy businesses it can wildly understate the labor the model actually depends on.

Invested Capital

What it is: The capital actually deployed in operations, from all providers - debt plus equity, minus the cash that is just sitting there. It is the base on which the business earns its returns.

Why value investors care: This is the ROIC denominator, and ROIC is what many investors consider the single best measure of business quality: a company earning 20% on invested capital has something a 6% earner does not, whatever their PE ratios say. The figure matters mostly through that ratio rather than on its own. The caveat: definitions vary across data providers - goodwill treatment especially - so compare ROIC figures only when you know they share a formula.

Operating Cash Flow Ratio

What it is: Operating cash flow divided by current liabilities - a liquidity test asking whether a year of operating cash can cover the bills due within the year.

Why value investors care: Above 1 is comfortable: the company services its short-term obligations from operations alone, no refinancing required. It is stricter and harder to game than the current ratio, which counts inventory that may never sell at book value. Below 0.5 with heavy short-term debt is where liquidity crises come from, and it is a useful filter for excluding fragile balance sheets before you ever look at valuation. The caveat: seasonal businesses can dip below 1 mid-cycle without being in trouble.

Operating Cash Flow Sales Ratio

What it is: The cash margin: how many cents of operating cash each dollar of sales produces. It is the cash-flow twin of net margin.

Why value investors care: Above 15% signals a genuinely cash-generative model. Set it beside net margin - the two should travel together, and a persistent gap where accounting profits outrun cash is the oldest earnings-quality warning there is. As a filter, requiring a positive OCF margin removes companies whose profits exist only on paper. Working-capital swings make single years noisy, so read it across three or more before rewarding or punishing anyone.

Retained Earnings

Retained Earnings — cumulative net income minus all dividends ever paid.

What it is: The lifetime profits kept inside the business rather than distributed - every dollar the company ever earned, minus every dollar it ever paid out, accumulated since founding.

Why value investors care: A large balance means a long profitable history. A negative balance means one of two very different things: cumulative lifetime losses, or a long history of buybacks and dividends exceeding earnings - a mature company returning capital aggressively can run negative retained earnings while being in excellent health, so check which story applies before judging. The sharper test is Buffett’s: has each retained dollar created at least a dollar of market value? Management that keeps the money owes you proof it can compound it. The figure itself says nothing about where the money went or how well it was spent.

Revenue

Revenue — total sales over the trailing twelve months.

What it is: The top line - everything the company billed customers over the trailing twelve months, before any costs are subtracted.

Why value investors care: In a screener it works best as a filter, not a signal. A size floor - requiring, say, $100M of revenue - removes shells and story stocks whose ratios are pure noise, and a positive-revenue check is the most basic sanity test there is. Revenue is also the hardest statement line to fake outright, which is why the sales-based multiples exist as a fallback when earnings are suspect. Remember it is not the size of the profit pool: a distributor’s billions can carry thinner economics than a niche firm’s millions.

SGA to Revenue

What it is: Selling, general, and administrative expenses as a share of sales - the overhead ratio: what fraction of every revenue dollar goes to running the organization rather than making the product.

Why value investors care: It is a discipline gauge. A low, stable ratio suggests cost control; a creeping one means the organization is growing faster than its output, which is how strong margins quietly erode. The pattern worth screening for is the ratio falling while revenue grows - that is operating leverage working, each new sales dollar arriving cheaper than the last. Compare within industries: heavy-advertising consumer brands live at ratios that would signal disaster in distribution. The trap is capitalization - some firms tuck costs into other lines - so cross-check operating margin too.

Tangible Asset Value

What it is: Book value with the accounting air let out: total assets minus intangibles and goodwill, minus everything owed. What remains for shareholders counting only assets you could theoretically touch or sell - the hard-asset base.

Why value investors care: This is the conservative Graham-style anchor: a stock trading below tangible book is backed by hard assets even if the operations disappoint, which is a margin of safety no earnings forecast can provide. For serial acquirers carrying huge goodwill, the gap between stated and tangible book measures how much of the balance sheet is paid-for hope. The caveat: asset-light businesses will look absurdly expensive on it - a software firm’s real assets never touch the balance sheet - so use it where hard assets are the business, and not elsewhere.

Total Assets

Total Assets — everything the company owns, at balance-sheet value.

What it is: The full left side of the balance sheet: cash, receivables, inventory, property, goodwill, the lot, at stated accounting value.

Why value investors care: Alone it mostly indicates scale and feeds the ratios - asset turnover, ROA, equity multipliers. The one direct read: a balance sheet growing much faster than revenue deserves suspicion, because assets are where aggressive accounting hides - capitalized costs, swollen goodwill, doubtful receivables - each inflating today’s assets at the expense of tomorrow’s write-downs.

Total Liabilities

Total Liabilities — everything the company owes, short and long term.

What it is: All obligations on the balance sheet: debt, payables, deferred taxes, leases, pension shortfalls. Subtracted from total assets it yields book equity.

Why value investors care: It is half of every leverage measure, and screening on debt alone misses the rest - operating leases and pension obligations sank plenty of retailers whose bond debt looked tame. A liabilities-to-assets ratio drifting up over years is a business slowly mortgaging itself, whatever the income statement says.

Working Capital

What it is: Current assets minus current liabilities - the liquidity cushion in dollars: how much short-term resource the company holds beyond the bills coming due within the year.

Why value investors care: Positive means near-term obligations are covered from near-term assets; deeply negative can mean either distress or an elite model where customers pay before suppliers are due - subscription firms and fast-turning retailers run negative working capital by design, so the sign alone settles nothing. The screening use is as a solvency filter and as the denominator of Working Capital Turnover. The historical footnote worth knowing: Graham’s net-net screen used working capital minus all liabilities as a liquidation floor - buy below that and you get the business for free - a test almost nothing passes in modern markets, which tells you something about modern markets.