Revenue

How Kernel determines annual revenue, currency, source, and scope

Revenue is the company's annual top-line figure. Kernel looks for total revenue, net revenue, net sales, turnover, or operating revenue. It does not use EBITDA, net income, operating income, balance-sheet items, or a single quarter as annual revenue.

Revenue is the annual top line, as reported. Profit metrics, single quarters, forecasts, and balance-sheet items do not qualify.

Most private companies do not disclose a clean number, and even public figures can be hard to compare. One source may report pounds for a fiscal year ending in March. Another may report euros for a calendar year. A bare number without currency, period, source, or scope is not very useful.

How Kernel determines revenue

Kernel searches for reported revenue across public filings, registries, annual reports, earnings releases, investor materials, credible news, and official company disclosures. When a company reports revenue in a local currency, Kernel keeps the local figure and converts it to USD using the verified annual average exchange rate for the relevant fiscal year.

Scope is handled separately. A segment is not the whole company, and a holding company's direct revenue is not the same as the revenue of the group below it. Kernel returns entity-level and consolidated values, then provides a primary value for CRM and export workflows.

When no public revenue figure can be found, Kernel estimates from signals such as headcount, industry, revenue model, operating model, geography, company maturity, and funding profile. Estimated values are labeled as estimates and do not carry the highest confidence.

Key data points

Label	Description
Entity revenue	Annual revenue for the resolved legal entity.
Consolidated revenue	Annual revenue for the entity plus its subsidiaries, when available.
Recommended revenue	The CRM-ready revenue value Kernel recommends for the account.
Currency	The source currency Kernel found before converting revenue values.
USD value	Revenue converted to USD when the source figure and conversion are reliable.
Confidence	How strong the supporting evidence is.
Reasoning	Explanation of the source, currency handling, fiscal period, scope, and caveats.

Kernel returns null rather than inventing a value when it cannot determine a safe figure or cannot perform a reliable currency conversion.

Entity/Consolidated/Recommended

Kernel keeps the value and its scope separate before choosing a CRM-ready recommendation.

Term	Meaning
Entity	The value for the resolved legal entity itself. For headcount, this means direct payroll headcount for that entity. For revenue, this means annual revenue attributable to that entity.
Consolidated	The value for the entity plus its subsidiaries, when a reliable group-level value is available. This is useful when the account is a parent or holding company and the standalone entity does not reflect the scale of the operating group below it.
Recommended	Kernel chooses either Entity or Consolidated depending on the entity. For most operating companies, this is the entity value. For holding companies or group parents, Kernel may recommend the consolidated value because it better represents the account's scale.

See the Kernel Account object reference for field types and help text.