Old financials quietly inflate confidence. Misano's multiples engine applies a staleness gate so yesterday's EBITDA cannot silently price today's company.
What the gate does
- Age of a metric relative to the reference year: > 2 years = soft-stale (used, but flagged); > 4 years = hard-stale (unusable for the headline; the method cascade drops down).
- When a whole series is hard-stale, only the NAV anchor remains for the headline path — not a fake-fresh multiple.
- A two-year lag is the normal cadence of Czech reporting, which is why ≤ 2 years counts as fresh.
Latest-year rule (related, not the same as soft/hard-stale)
- Valuation is driven by the latest filed year. If EBITDA is missing in that year, the company is valued on EV/Revenue from current revenue with an explanatory label.
- Misano never carries EBITDA forward from an older year. That would silently value today's company on years-old profitability.
Integrity before multiples
- Every series passes an integrity gate. A year where EBITDA > revenue is excluded and reported as provisional data — not silently "fixed."
- Full cascade (custom → niche → NACE; EV/EBITDA → P/E → EV/Revenue), triangulation, and football field: misano.ai/guides/how-we-value-companies-at-scale and misano.ai/guides/value-band-is-triangulated.
What this is not
- Not the 18-month last-round mark warning on Portfolio (that is marking, not multiples). See misano.ai/guides/when-last-round-marks-go-stale.
- Not a claim that every soft-stale filing is worthless — soft-stale is used and flagged; hard-stale cannot headline.
- Not a rewrite of the full valuation essay.
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See also: misano.ai/guides/how-we-value-companies-at-scale, misano.ai/guides/value-band-is-triangulated, misano.ai/guides/fair-market-value-for-a-financial-buyer, and misano.ai/guides/when-last-round-marks-go-stale.