Stage 3 — Populated Financials

Deliverable: populated workbook in 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 — empty startYear_* cells
Running a skill's identity checks against your own workbook, and explaining a failure instead of hiding it

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; the rubric reads it
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.

Run the skill's identity checks

The performance-ratios skill you installed at Stage 1 lists the identities any model built on this workbook must satisfy (its Section 4). Four of them apply to the workbook alone: 1 balance sheet balances, 2 Du Pont ties, 4 operating income reconciles, 5 cash from operations rebuilds. The others apply to the DCF you build in Stage 7.

Open Claude Code or Codex in your repo folder and prompt:

Use the performance-ratios skill in .claude/skills/performance-ratios/ to run
identity checks 1, 2, 4 and 5 on models/builds/<your-file>.xlsx. First list
every defined name the skill expects and flag any that is missing or empty.
Report each check as pass or fail with the two numbers compared. Do not change
any cells.

No AI tool installed? Upload the workbook and the skill's SKILL.md to Claude.ai or ChatGPT and use the same prompt.

Save the report, unedited, as analysis/validation/YYYY-MM-DD-{company-slug}-identity-checks-log.md. Under each failure add one line: what caused it and what you changed. A failure almost always means a value went into the wrong cell or under the wrong sign — fix the entry, never a formula.

Check 5 can differ from the filing

The template's indirect method starts from net income; many filers start from profit before tax. A difference from the cash from operations your company filed is not a failure to fix — it is a difference to explain in one sentence.

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).
Non-controlling interest: if the filing reports it (also called minority interest), enter it inside shareholders' equity — the template has no separate line and folds it into equity, so the balance sheet still balances. Record the amount, both years, with its page reference, on the Notes tab. The Stage 6 DCF needs that figure for its equity bridge, and the workbook cannot supply it any other way.

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-{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)
analysis/validation/YYYY-MM-DD-{company-slug}-identity-checks-log.md — the skill's report, each failure explained
Notes tab: Units row filled in; non-controlling interest recorded if the filing reports it

Rubric

The headings below are what the work is read for. Weights and due dates are in your course schedule.

Criterion	Strong work looks like
Data accuracy (ties to source)	Spot-checks match the audited financials line for line
Completeness (both years)	All `INC_`, `BAL_`, `CASH_`, `startYear_` cells filled
Source documentation	Cover tab cites source, standard, currency, FYE; non-US adjustments noted
Ratios resolve and identities pass	No error cells anywhere on the Ratios tab; identity-check log committed, every failure fixed or explained