I have been enjoying Google Finance, have you?
One of the things it seems particularly useful for is finding comparable public companies for private companies.
For example, the other day I was researching a large privately held food processor in Washington. The company discloses sales, and number of employees but not much else.
I clicked on the “food” subcategory under related companies, and Google Finance provided me with a list of more than 2000 other companies. Then, I further drilled down into the sub-category “Canned/Frozen/Preserved Foods”, which gave me a list of about 400 companies. Since Google Finance lets you sort by revenue, I was able to find 10 publicly held companies with similar revenues and endeavor.
At that point, I looked at the publicly held companies individually. Reuters provides financial information to Google Finance, including a ratio called the Net Profit Margin for the last 12 months (also known as Trailing Twelve Months or TTM). The Net Profit Margin for these 10 companies was within a few percentage points of each other, so I was able to provide, with some confidence, an estimated net profit based on sales for this family held company.
This was very useful in developing a family gift capacity.