Kumu / Corporate Finance / Stage 3
Stage 3 — Populate the Financials
models/builds/
Real numbers from your company's audited filings go into the template — Income Statement, Balance Sheet, Cash Flow, two years each. The discipline this stage teaches: be sure the numbers are right before you tell stories about them. Interpretation waits for Stage 5.
What you'll learn
- Tie-out discipline — cross-checking totals against the source filing before trusting line items
- How currency, units, and reporting standards (VAS / IFRS / U.S. GAAP) change what a number means
- Reading the model's error signals:
#DIV/0!,#REF!, and the silent killer — emptystartYear_*cells
Tie out, don't transcribe
Open the annual report and the template side by side. Enter the statements, then verify totals first: does your Total Assets match the filing to the last digit? Total Revenue? If a total is off, a line item is wrong, missing, or double-counted — find it now, because at Stage 5 the LLM will happily build a confident narrative on top of a wrong number.
| Self-check | What to verify | If it fails |
|---|---|---|
| Balance sheet balances | Assets = Liabilities + Equity, both years | Small gap → sign or rounding error; big gap → missing line (intangibles, deferred tax…) |
| No error cells | Every formula resolves to a number | #DIV/0! → empty denominator; #REF! → a named range got deleted |
| Prior year populated | startYear_* ranges have values | The most common Stage 3 mistake — ROA, asset turnover, inventory turnover fail silently without it |
| Sign sanity | No impossible negatives (negative inventory…) | Usually a contra account entered in the wrong section |
| Source documented | Cover tab: source URL, standard, currency, FYE | Fill it in — 20% of this stage's grade |
| Ratios tab alive | Rows show numbers | Blank tab → you typed into the wrong cells; formulas reference named ranges, not addresses |
You can rehearse the whole mechanic in the Ratio Lab — it runs the same balance check and the same averaging conventions as the template.
Units, currency, and standards
- Units: Vietnamese filings often report in millions or billions of VND; U.S. filings in millions of USD. Pick one unit, note it on the Cover tab, and stay consistent across every tab. A mixed-unit workbook produces ratios that are wrong by factors of a thousand — and still look plausible.
- Standards: VAS, IFRS, and U.S. GAAP classify some items differently (leases, revaluation, provisions). You don't need to restate anything — just note the standard and any items that will affect ratio interpretation later.
- Market assumptions: share price at fiscal year end, shares outstanding, tax rate, cost of capital — source them and enter them in the assumptions cells (blue).
Weird ratio? Don't "fix" the data
If a computed ratio looks strange, resist the urge to massage inputs until it behaves. Write it down. A strange-but-correct ratio is usually a spec gap your Stage 4 human-in-the-loop pass should address — and it often becomes the most interesting paragraph of your final analysis.
Where the LLM helps (and where it must not)
| Good LLM uses | Off-limits |
|---|---|
| Drafting the Cover-tab documentation from your populated file | Entering the financial statement values. The numbers must come from the source filing through your own eyes — that's the discipline this stage exists to build. Housekeeping yes, numbers no. |
| Spot-checking three computed ratios against their input named ranges | |
Suggesting consistent number formats for BAL_* / INC_* / RATIO_* cells |
Submission checklist
- Workbook at
models/builds/YYYY-MM-DD-{lastname}-{company-slug}-financials.xlsx - Income Statement, Balance Sheet, Cash Flow — current and prior year
- Totals tie to the source filing (spot-checked Total Assets and Total Revenue)
- Balance sheet balances in both years
- Market assumptions entered (price at FYE, shares outstanding, tax rate, cost of capital)
- Cover tab: source URL, reporting standard, currency, fiscal year end
- Ratios tab computes cleanly — no
#REF!,#DIV/0!, or#NAME? - Committed incrementally (one commit per statement beats one big dump)
Rubric
| Criterion | % | Strong work looks like |
|---|---|---|
| Data accuracy (ties to source) | 40% | Spot-checks match the audited financials line for line |
| Completeness (both years) | 25% | All INC_*, BAL_*, CASH_*, startYear_* cells filled |
| Source documentation | 20% | Cover tab cites source, standard, currency, FYE; non-US adjustments noted |
| Ratios resolve cleanly | 15% | No error cells anywhere on the Ratios tab |