Turn a 300-Page HK Annual Report into Structured Financials

A hands-on test of Baidu PaddleOCR, the open source document AI engine with 81K Stars. PP-OCRv5 with 96.5% accuracy extracted 102 text regions from a Hong Kong stock annual report P&L page, discovered a KMeans clustering bug (n_clusters=0) in the PP-StructureV3 Transformers engine, built a custom DBSCAN row and column clustering parser, and completed automatic structuring of three financial statements end to end in 83 seconds.

Building on the PaddleOCR field practice, this pushes 'reading out the text' to 'usable data': locating the financial-statement pages, handling cross-page tables, field mapping and unit normalization for the three statements and segment information, JSON schema design, and a complete pipeline and checklist for automated proofreading via reconciliation relationships.

The first bottleneck of automating financial-statement analysis is that machines cannot read the PDF. This article breaks down the three paths — text-layer extraction, OCR, and layout analysis — explains why financial tables are especially hard to read and why human proofreading is mandatory after OCR, and gives the design concepts of structured output (JSON schema).

Profit is an opinion; cash is a fact. This article takes apart the reconciliation relations of the income statement, balance sheet, and cash-flow statement, gives check dimensions such as the cash conversion ratio, working capital, and capitalized spending, adds a 'red-flag signal → account to check → verification method' cheat sheet, and demonstrates writing these checks as an automatically executable, traceable rule engine.

The difficulty in comparable company analysis is not the arithmetic of multiples but the basis: fiscal year, currency, one-off items, and EV composition can all let two companies' numbers contaminate each other. This article breaks down the criteria for selecting peers, six categories of basis-unification rules, and the traps in choosing multiples, and gives a five-stage automation pipeline design with executable code, from data extraction to outlier handling.