Extracting & Processing Financial Data from PDFs

ScoutAsia Technology Solutions are provided through the bespoke deployment of our AI technologies, optimized to help businesses solve specific digital transformation challenges. Read on or visit www.scout.asia to learn more about how a ScoutAsia Technology Solution can help your business.

Many of our clients need to process corporate 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 the PDF files and record it on spreadsheets.

This is time-consuming, error-prone process, which means issues are often spotted too late, and many problems are never spotted at all. Below is one real-life example of how ScoutAsia Technology Solutions can radically improve data analysis.

The challenge: Dull, repetitive manual work
Analysts manually copy financial data from PDFs to Excel spreadsheets. Once the data has been converted to such spreadsheets, analysts then perform calculations of simple ratios (e.g., quick ratio, asset turnover ratio) to track companies' financial indicators. Next, the resulting numbers are compared with those of previous years. The goal of these tasks is to learn about the financial health of targeted companies.

There is a need to automate the manual, repetitive aspects of the financial data analysis process so that analysts are freed up to focus on the real work: the analysis.

The solution: Less work by hand for optimal analysis

ScoutAsia's Technology Solutions allow for optimized extraction of financial statements from PDF files. To successfully automate the process, our AI-driven machines perform the following tasks.

✓ Differentiation of income statements or profit and loss (P&L) material, cash flow statements and balance sheet information from other data and text within a document
✓Detection of the boundaries of tabular data, since financial statements in annual reports are often presented without such boundaries

With ScoutAsia's Technology Solutions, the analysts can now accurately extract and convert tables of financial data from PDF to Excel files, which results in the following benefits.

✓ Fewer data and calculation errors
✓ An increase in team productivity and capacity
✓ More time for actual analysis
✓ Fewer blinds spots, thanks to automated alerts for long-tail monitoring

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

Alerts can be further customized to make you aware of significant changes to a company's debt-to-equity ratio, for instance. This allows more timely, deeper analysis to be pursued.

ScoutAsia brings intelligent machines to your own unique environment. Our team of technology experts gives you a variety of AI-driven solutions. To learn more, visit www.scout.asia or reach out to our team at [email protected].

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