Towards automating Numerical Consistency Checks in Financial Reports

Abstract: 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 F$_1$ 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.