New to this? Reading a screening verdict covers the background this guide assumes, as part of the course.
Computershare (CPU) passes both the debt and cash ratio comfortably: 8.3% and 6.4% of market cap, well under the 30% ceiling either way. On a two-ratio screen, it's a clean pass. But Computershare discloses something most companies don't: "margin income," the interest it earns on client cash balances held in trust as part of its share registry business. In FY26, that was $748.7 million against $3,257.5 million in total management revenue, about 23% of revenue, against AAOIFI's 5% impermissible-income ceiling. That's not an estimate; it's the company's own reported figure. A ratio-only screen would never catch it, because it isn't a balance-sheet ratio at all, it's an income-composition question. See it flagged directly on the ASX screener.
The pre-revenue miner pattern is subtler and, we think, more useful to understand generally. Predictive Discovery (PDI), Deep Yellow (DYL) and NexGen Energy (NXG via its NYSE listing) are all pre-production explorers with clean balance sheets: low debt, substantial cash from capital raises. But their reported revenue is negligible: PDI's is around $0.17M against $32.5M in cash; DYL's is around $0.02M against $187M in cash. When a company has almost no product revenue but a large cash pile sitting in term deposits, whatever "revenue" it does report is very likely dominated by interest income on that cash, which means the impermissible-income ratio could be close to 100%, not the near-zero a clean balance sheet would suggest.
The pattern to watch for generally: any company reporting near-zero revenue alongside a large cash balance is worth a second look before assuming a clean ratio screen means clean income. It shows up most often in exploration-stage resources companies, which raise capital well before they have anything to sell.