Does your area have a billionaires' club? That's what the St. Petersburg Times calls its list of the 10 largest public companies in the Tampa Bay area. You can tally up the wealth of public companies in your area fairly easily by using the Internet to access U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings and a spreadsheet to crunch the numbers.

The Times has been publishing an annual report about the top public companies in our area for 10 years. Initially, we hired an outside vendor to collect and analyze the statistics for us, but we quickly figured out we could do it ourselves. Over the years we have made numerous changes in how the report is prepared. We now do a streamlined report, focused on the 10 largest companies (down from 50), called the Times 10.

Our starting point is the running list we keep of all public companies in our area traded on the New York or American stock exchanges or the NASDAQ Stock Market (bulletin board stocks are excluded). We publish closing prices on these stocks daily. I narrow the list to the ones that have large enough revenues to have a chance of making the top 10 cutoff before I get down to serious data collection. (After you've done this one year, you'll have a good idea of the contenders the following year.)

We make our comparisons based on the most recently completed fiscal year. Since most companies have a Dec. 31 year-end, I start compiling the report in April and we publish it in May. An alternative approach is to use the four most recently completed quarters. However, that becomes more complicated, so I do it only for one company that is always late getting its results out.

The primary source for my information is the Form 10-K annual report that companies file with the SEC at the end of the fiscal year. You can find these reports on the SEC Web site (www.sec.gov) or via links on the company's Web site. I use the commercial 10k Wizard (www.10kwizard.com), which provides easy searches of the filings.

Although financials can be downloaded, I prefer to write down the information I want and print the pages to check my numbers against later. I collect these numbers for the most recent year and the previous year: Revenues, net income, net income per share and shareholder equity. I average the two years of equity to get the figure used in calculating return on equity.

I use a Bloomberg terminal to get the closing stock price on my chosen date (typically the last Friday in April) and the date two years earlier, to calculate the total return for that period and to get the dividend and market capitalization. If you don't have access to a Bloomberg terminal, you can use Yahoo Finance (http://finance.yahoo.com) to get closing stock prices. If you multiply shares outstanding (from the 10-K) by the share price, you have market cap. I type all this information into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet.

The top 10 rankings are based solely on total revenues. Once I have the top 10, I use the spreadsheet to calculate rankings for those companies that made the list. First I type in the formulas to get the information I want, such as the year-over-year change in revenue (2004 revenue 2003 revenue / 2003 revenue) and the return on equity (2004 net income / average shareholder equity for 2003 and 2004). Then I use the Sort function to rank the companies by fastest growing, most profitable, most valuable (based on market cap) and best and worst investments.

We publish a short profile about each company in the Times 10, including basic information such as address, telephone number, type of business, top executives and number of employees. Normally all this can be found in the 10-K. If you don't follow the company closely, call to verify that the executives haven't changed since the 10-K was published.

One caution: when companies lose money, it will do funky things to the calculations of year-to-year changes. When I calculate the fastest-growing profits list, I deal with this issue by only considering companies that were profitable in both years. For the individual profiles, I calculate a change in total profits and use positive or negative values based on what makes sense even if it is not mathematically correct. I show a positive number for a company that went from a loss to a profit and a negative number for a company that went from a profit to a loss. If a company lost money both years, I show a positive number if the loss got smaller and a negative number if it got larger. I note this in a footnote and have never had anybody complain about this approach.

Contact Helen Huntley by e-mail at huntley@sptimes.com