The Benchmarking insight compares a client's turnover or expenses against thousands of other businesses, plotted by company age. You can narrow the comparison by industry or region, and choose whether to benchmark against your own practice or the wider Dext dataset.
To access it, go to a client's account and select Insights in the left navigation, then select Benchmarking.
Important: This insight is available for Xero clients only.
Who can use this insight
The Benchmarking insight is available to practices with the Data Health & Insights add-on, on Practice Essentials and Practice Advanced plans.
Metric and comparison options
Two controls at the top of the page determine what the chart shows.
Metric — select either Turnover or Expenses to choose which financial measure to benchmark.
Compare Against — filter the comparison group. Options are All, Industry, and Region. Industry and Region are determined using Companies House data cross-checked against general ledger data, using AI matching to find the best fit.
All vs Team
Two tabs at the top of the page control which dataset the client is benchmarked against.
All — benchmarks the client against the wider Dext dataset. Results are displayed as a heat map, showing the distribution of businesses across company age and the selected metric.
Team — benchmarks the client against businesses within your own practice only. Results are displayed as individual data points.
Reading the chart
The chart plots the selected metric on the y-axis against company age in years on the x-axis. The client's position is shown on the chart relative to the comparison group.
Below the chart, Dext shows two statistics:
How the client's metric compares to other businesses of the same company age.
How the client's metric compares to all businesses in the comparison group regardless of age.
Minimum data requirement
Benchmarking requires a minimum number of businesses in the comparison group to generate results.
If there isn't enough data — including when filtering by Industry or Region — Dext displays the message "Not enough data for comparison. Try changing your filters."
Broadening the comparison by switching to All, or removing the Industry or Region filter, will usually resolve this.
Syncing and recalculating data
To update the Benchmarking insight, use the two buttons at the top of the page:
Sync — pulls any new data or changes from Xero into Dext.
Recalculate — recalculates the insight based on the latest data pulled into Dext.
If you've made changes in Xero, select Sync first, then Recalculate to see the updated figures.