Towards automating Numerical Consistency Checks in Financial Reports

Author: Hillebrand, Lars; Deußer, Tobias; Dilmaghani, Tim; Kliem, Bernd; Loitz, Rüdiger; Bauckhage, Christian; Sifa, Rafet
Booktitle: Big Data Conference Europe
Year: 2022

Citation information

Hillebrand, Lars; Deußer, Tobias; Dilmaghani, Tim; Kliem, Bernd; Loitz, Rüdiger; Bauckhage, Christian; Sifa, Rafet:
Towards automating Numerical Consistency Checks in Financial Reports.
Big Data Conference Europe,
2022,
https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.06112

We introduce KPI-Check, a novel system that automatically identifies and cross-checks semantically equivalent key performance indicators (KPIs), e.g. “revenue” or “total costs”, in real-world German financial reports. It combines a financial named entity and relation extraction module with a BERT-based filtering and text pair classification component to extract KPIs from unstructured sentences before linking them to synonymous occurrences in the balance sheet and profit & loss statement. The tool achieves a high matching performance of 73.00% micro F1 on a hold out test set and is currently being deployed for a globally operating major auditing firm to assist the auditing procedure of financial statements.