Balance sheet tools come in all shapes and sizes. Some of their functionalities include analysis, visualisation and automated reconciliation. For professionals in financial services, operating balance sheet tools can save hours of labour. Newer, AI-powered balance sheet tools make manual processes like extracting data, calculating simple ratios and structuring spreadsheets obsolete.
In this post, we’ll take a short walk through Evolution AI’s latest offering – the balance sheet tool Financial Statements AI. We’ll explain what it does – including a video demonstration – and how you can access it for free.
We built Financial Statements AI around two questions: is there a gap in our offerings?; and, if so, why is there a gap?
The answer to the first question is yes – we resolved to automate data extraction from various financial documents. However, we didn’t initially offer extraction services for financial statements. As clients started using our services for bank statements, invoices, contracts and so on, we noted that one document was missing – the financial statement, of course.
Then, we realised that no one could extract data from financial statements. Neither data extraction vendors nor companies building internal extraction solutions could satisfactorily extract from financial statements. Wrangling the complex financial information into structured data was technologically difficult, even for experienced machine learning developers.
The financial data contained in financial statements, annual reports and more represents several crucial concepts: cash flow, creditworthiness and resilience. Since it can take up to three hours for an experienced analyst to understand how a financial statement represents how a company makes money, what are the chances of rudimentary learning systems understanding how complex financial data interrelates?
Yet, we weren’t trying to build AI that replaced the role of analysts. Rather, we wanted to develop AI that helped analysts have more productive office days. And that’s the genesis of Financial Statements AI.
To be precise, Financial Statements AI does three things: page classification, data extraction and simple (but accurate) data analysis. Let’s break it down.
Lengthy annual reports spanning 100+ pages require careful scanning to identify the balance sheet and income statement. Our technology quickly identifies – or classifies – the financial statements in a document and presents them for download.
Instead of using faulty tools or – even worse – manually copying and pasting from financial statement PDFs into an Excel spreadsheet, our balance sheet tool converts PDFs of financial statements into downloadable Excel spreadsheets.
The tool carefully calculates key financial ratios using the extracted financial data, presenting them as structured data. Examples of this structured data include:
These ratios provide a concise financial statement summary, offering a quick overview of the company's financial health. Of course, these financial ratios are not inherently difficult for either humans or AI to manually calculate. Instead, they are typically a matter of addition or subtraction. For example, you can simply add (together) the Cash and Cash Equivalents, Inventory and Accounts Receivable, Marketable Securities, Prepaid Expenses and Other Liquid Assets to calculate current assets. For junior and mid-level analysts working towards what the Financial Times dubs ‘raw processing horsepower’, extra shortcuts can go a long way in saving time and resources.
Central to Financial Statements AI’s functionalities is AI, particularly Large Language Models (LLMs). These LLMs possess financial knowledge that allows them to understand what the financial data looks like, its meaning and how it relates to other financial data. That’s how it can make contextual decisions, such as what counts as a tangible asset.
Though Financial Statements AI does not offer in-depth balance sheet analysis, it provides the important data – cleaned and structured. Whether you’re just looking for the balance sheet in a quarterly report or want a general overview of a financial statement via its key ratios, Financial Statements AI is the balance tool for the job.
We’ve designed our balance sheet tool to be as user-friendly as possible. Let’s explore how to cut the manual data manipulation out of your financial statement processes.
Once we’ve confirmed your use case, we’ll send you a login link.
Click ‘Upload’ to upload a financial statement. A small wheel will appear next to the uploaded file.
You can switch between the screens and edit the raw data as desired.
The data will download instantly to your device. It really is that simple.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on Financial Statements AI – find out how to try it for free below.
The balance sheet tool landscape is currently thriving. Fuelled by AI advancements in a rapidly expanding global fintech landscape, there’s no better time to explore balance sheet tools. As these fundamental technologies improve, you can anticipate balance sheet tools becoming faster and even more accurate, with more sophisticated analytical and predictive capabilities.
Ultimately, seeing is believing, and we invite you and your colleagues to try Financial Statements AI for free. Book a demo with our financial data project team or email hello@evolution.ai to get started.
