Extracting financial statement data from PDF files

A scoutAsia Custom Solution is a bespoke deployment of our AI technologies, optimised to help businesses solve specific digital transformation challenges. Learn more about how a ScoutAsia Custom Solution can help your business or contact us at [email protected].

Many of our clients need to process company financial data, which is often published in tables within large PDF documents. Before any analysis can begin, analysts must first extract the data by hand from those PDF files and enter it into a spreadsheet.

This process is error prone and time consuming, which means issues are often spotted too late and many issues are never spotted at all.

The challenge
To automate the manual, repetitive parts of the financial data analysis process, so that analysts are freed up to focus on the real work: the analysis.

Before: Manual, dull, repetitive
Analysts manually copy financial data from PDFs to Excel spreadsheets.

Once the data has been converted to Excel spreadsheets, analysts would then perform calculations of simple ratios (e.g. quick ratio, asset turnover ratio) to track companies’ financial indicators, before comparing these numbers to those of previous years. The goal of these tasks was to check the financial health of targeted companies.

After: Better-performing analysts
Our time-saving technology can accurately extract and convert tables of financial data from PDF to Excel files, which results in:
✓ Fewer data and calculation errors
✓ An increase in team productivity and capacity
✓ Time freed for the actual analysis
✓ Fewer blinds spots thanks to automated alerts for long-tail monitoring

How: Our Custom Solution
Our technology is optimised to extract financial statements from PDF files. To successfully automate the extraction of these financial statements from PDFs, our AI-driven machines are optimised to:
✓ Differentiate income statements or profit and loss (P&L), cash flow statements and balance sheets from other data and text within the document.
✓Detect the boundaries of the tabular data, since financial statements in annual reports are often presented without these boundaries.

Alerts for automated long-tail monitoring
Long-tail monitoring, while necessary, is often ignored because of its time-consuming nature. With ScoutAsia’s alerts feature, our technology automatically monitors new or updated documents and alerts you when the processing has finished and the extracted data is ready for analysis.

Alerts can be further customised to alert you to significant changes to a company’s debt-to-equity ratio, for instance, so timely, deeper analysis can be pursued.

Other features
✓ Encrypted and secure
✓ Runs on our cloud or your infrastructure
✓ Flexible outputs (Excel, CSV, APIs)
✓ Integrates with your existing software

Interested?
Learn more about how a ScoutAsia Custom Solution can help your business or contact us at [email protected].