Every figure in a spread, a model or a memo starts as a line on a source document. Line-level source tracing keeps the connection between the two, so anyone reviewing the analysis can open the exact line a figure came from.
This guide covers how source tracing saves analysts time, why chart of accounts mapping depends on it and how it is changing credit and market intelligence.
Bounding boxes save time and money
A bounding box marks the place on the page where a figure was printed. When every extracted figure carries one, an analyst checking a number opens its source line directly instead of searching the document for it.
Analysts spend less time on the rote task of searching through documents and more time on deal analysis.
When you've automated the spreading process with source tracing to verify it, a financial analysis has fewer delays and involves less manual labor.
Data mapping and normalization need bounding boxes
Chart of accounts mapping places every line a company reports into a standard set of accounts, and the benefits are numerous. Standard accounts let a team compare companies and periods on the same terms, whatever each company called its own lines. They give investors and prospective buyers a clear view of the financials in a structure they already know. They also leave an audit trail, since each account can be traced back through the lines that were mapped into it.
If you're going to fold 100 balance sheet rows into 8 account codes, you need to be confident about where the numbers are coming from. Some firms hire labor teams to do this work, but it can be automated with SpreadSpace.
Automated chart of accounts mapping was never possible before because of one major issue. Checking where every line came from would take quite a while when you're going through dozens of tables manually. With SpreadSpace, every single item is traced to its source line. There is no ambiguity.
What if there's a mapping mistake?
In the rare event that a line is misclassified, SpreadSpace lets your analyst override the classification. Because the line stays traced to its source, the analyst can see exactly what the document printed before moving it.
Those are two different grants. Overriding a single line is an analyst permission: underwriters, supervisors and admins can correct what a line was read as, and every override stays traced to the document. The chart of accounts itself, the caption rules that map lines into it and its export map belong to owners and admins, so a one-line correction never rewrites the mapping for the whole organization.
How is source tracing affecting credit and market intelligence?
Credit and market intelligence teams work through financial data from many companies, and every figure has to be checked against its source before anyone relies on it. When each mapped figure is already traced to its source line, that check no longer needs a team doing it by hand.
SpreadSpace's automatic account mapping is allowing companies to lay off their offshore review teams. This could mean hundreds of thousands of dollars saved for large enterprises.
Discuss your mapping workflow
Bring a representative set of documents and your chart of accounts to a conversation about automating the mapping with SpreadSpace.