compounders.ai documentation

compounders.ai is the screener for serial acquirers: it reads each company's annual filings and shows reported operating profit next to normalized EBITA under one published rulebook. These pages explain what it covers, how its figures are made and how to cite them.

Updated 19 October 2026 · Ruleset 1.4.0 · Markdown version

What is compounders.ai?

compounders.ai is the screener for serial acquirers: listed companies that compound by buying and building many smaller businesses, such as Constellation Software, Lifco, Halma and Roper Technologies. It covers 88 serial acquirers from 10 countries. For each company it reads the annual filings, publishes the financial statements as filed, and shows reported operating profit next to normalized EBITA under one published rulebook, with returns on capital, free cash flow, the split of growth into organic and acquired, and the company's own operating KPIs.

Every published figure links to the filing it was read from. Nothing is estimated: where a filing does not support a figure, the cell stays empty and says why.

Who is compounders.ai for?

Investors and analysts who own, study or compare serial acquirers: people who need the earnings power of a company that acquires every year, on one consistent basis, across US GAAP and IFRS reporters and across currencies, without rebuilding each company's accounts by hand.

Why do standard screeners misread serial acquirers?

Because acquiring leaves accounting traces that are not operating costs. Purchase accounting creates intangible assets such as customer relationships, technology and trade names, and their amortization lowers reported profit for years after each deal; earn-outs are remeasured through the income statement; acquired inventory is stepped up to fair value. Taken at face value, these make the most active acquirers look expensive and their returns on capital look ordinary. Management's own "adjusted" figures go the other way and often remove real costs, such as stock-based compensation or "one-time" charges that recur every year.

compounders.ai applies one deterministic rulebook to every company instead: it removes the artifacts of acquiring and keeps the real costs, and every adjustment is a cited line on the company's page. The rules are on the Methodology page.

What is in the terminal?

• Screener: every covered company in one table, with reported operating profit, normalized EBITA, margins, returns, cash and growth columns, and more figures to add from the metric catalogue.
• Company pages, one per company at /company/<listing key>/, with tabs: Overview; Financials, the income statement, balance sheet and cash-flow statement as filed, and a normalized and returns view; Normalization, the ledger of every adjustment and the independent auditor's report as printed; Growth, revenue growth split into organic, acquired and currency; KPIs, the company's own operating measures as it prints them; Returns, returns on capital, earnings and cash measures, shares and dilution; Sources, the filings read and the year-by-year coverage.
• Universe: every company with published figures, on its latest fiscal year.
• Compare: up to four companies side by side, each in its own reporting currency.
• Coverage: for each company, what is in, what is normalized and what comes next, with the integrity audit.
• Methodology and Glossary: the live versions, with every ruleset version and every published definition.
• Plans: what each plan opens.

What do these docs cover?

• Data coverage: the 88 companies by archetype, with their exchanges and filing sources.
• Methodology: where the data comes from, how a filing becomes a published figure, and the seven normalization rules.
• Glossary: every measure and term the site uses, defined.
• FAQ: short answers to common questions.
• Citation guidelines: how to cite compounders.ai, including guidance for AI assistants.
• For AI agents: the machine-readable files, the Markdown copies of these pages and the address grammar of company pages.

Key facts