BookOfNumbers Website – A data store of June Return information

All of the water companies in England and Wales are required to provide data to the financial regulator, Ofwat, via the ‘June return’.  This data includes a variety of measures covering all activities of the companies and is useful for analysing trends in performance within a company and benchmarking against others.  Up until now the data has not been available in a central electronic store; however help is at hand with the new www.BookOfNumbers.co.uk web site.

The web site has been produced as part of the WRc portfolio CP346 Web-Based Benchmarking project and contains all of the publicly available Annual Return from 1996-97 onwards. All data is referenced by BONRef; an Ofwat maintained code that links the same measure irrespective of the reporting table.  The description of any BONRef can be viewed (as taken from the reporting guidance documents) to ensure the correct measure has been selected. Free text searching on the BONRef, title or description rapidly allows the user to select the BON references of interest.  Any measure contained in the annual return data can be selected for viewing in either tabular or graphical form and therefore enables easy manipulation and benchmarking of the information.

The site also allows custom measures to be created by simple arithmetic operators or even dividing one BONRef by another. Financial data can be reported as submitted or automatically inflated to today's prices (using either COPI or RPI). Once the data of interest has been identified it can be easily downloaded into an Excel spreadsheet for any further analysis.

Currently seven UK water companies are participating in the project and Ofwat have supported the project by supplying the source data in electronic form.  Access to the site is by company password allowing any number of users from participating companies to access the site.

For further information on participation in the project please contact Ian Dawes, WRc on 01793 865165.