Do You Vet Your Business Partners? Financial data that can do it in just a few clicks
38 ǀ POSITIV 3/2026
FINANCE
Do You Vet Your
Business Partners?
Financial data that can do it in just a few clicks
Property development and the construcon industry as a whole operate over long investment
horizons and rely on numerous subcontractors – and this is precisely where a small error
in assessing a business partner can prove costly. Filip Glasa, founder of FinStat, explains what
the numbers can reveal about the nancial health of a business partner and how the Czech
construcon industry is performing.
You have a strong presence in Slovakia. Did you also
have ambitions to expand abroad? What surprised
you most when entering other markets?
We decided to expand into Western Europe first, where
we operate under the Hit Horizons brand and provide
basic data coverage across the whole of Europe,
and only then enter the Czech market. We originally
expected a gap of two or three years, but it took much
longer, and we did not launch the Czech version
of FinStat until 2024 – ten years after Slovakia.
The biggest difference is our market presence. When
you enter a market that late, the cards have already
been dealt and you cannot expect to capture a large
share, although that did not particularly surprise
me. The second thing is that, as a foreign company,
marketing, sales and PR are all more difficult. At home,
people see you as an interesting local company;
abroad, you may still be interesting, but you are
“from somewhere else”. Otherwise, the Slovak
and Czech markets are very similar.
What should an entrepreneur check
about a business partner before signing a contract
with them?
The starting point is credit scoring models, which use
past insolvencies to estimate the probability of default.
The best known is the Altman Z–score, which we
refer to as Index 05, and we also have our own FinStat
score. One of the most reliable indicators is the ratio
between a company’s liabilities and its receivables, or
alternatively its EBITDA. If liabilities are growing faster
than receivables or operating profit, the company
is unlikely to have sufficient funds to repay them, even
if its reported revenues appear normal.
I would also look at the company’s overall level of debt
– around 60% of financing from external sources
is average, while 80–90% already represents a risk –
as well as trade payables, which are often overlooked
in financial indicators even though companies use them
as a source of financing in much the same way as loans.
This also applies to subcontractors in the construction
industry, where margins have remained low for a long
time, with a median of around 1.6%, roughly half
a percentage point lower than in the rest of the market.
How are construction companies
performing economically?
The number of insolvency proceedings
in the construction sector has risen slightly over the past
five years, from 69 in 2020 to this year’s high of 89,
while the number involving sole traders has declined
slightly. At the same time, the sector is growing –
almost 4,000 new companies were established last
FinStat is a database of corporate nancial
indicators and has been operang in the Slovak
market for twelve years. It is led by its founder
and CEO, Filip Glasa. FinStat entered the Czech
market in 2024, oering calculated nancial
indicators and its own FinStat score, which assesses
the probability of a company becoming insolvent.
| Text: MonikaŠevčíková, foto: FinStat,s.r.o.