How Credit Analysts Are Saving 10+ Hours Per Week with AI Extraction
Igor Strelkov
Published on July 7, 2025
When I worked as a junior credit analyst, Mondays were chaos.
My inbox would be full of PDF financials from small business clients. Each one needed to be reviewed, manually spread, standardized, and plugged into a model. By the time I finished extracting the balance sheet and income statement from just one report, I was exhausted—and I still had dozens more to go.
Fast forward to now: AI has completely changed the game.
Credit analysts around the world are saving 10+ hours per week using AI-powered extraction tools. Here’s how they’re doing it—and why you should, too.
The Time Sink: Manual Spreading
Spreading financial statements is necessary, but painful:
- Open PDF
- Search for relevant financials
- Copy line items into Excel
- Recalculate totals
- Standardize terms
- Double-check for errors
Even with templates, this process can take 30+ minutes per statement. Multiply that by 20–50 clients per week, and you're looking at 10–20 hours of repetitive, low-value work.
It doesn’t scale. It introduces errors. And it delays decisions.
How AI Tools Eliminate the Pain
Modern AI extraction tools like Assess Finance do the heavy lifting:
- Read native and scanned PDFs
- Detect and extract financial tables
- Normalize inconsistent labels (e.g., "Net Profit" vs. "Net Income")
- Map into GAAP/IFRS-style structures
- Export clean financials into Excel or CSV
With tools like these, credit analysts can:
- Review more applications faster
- Spend more time on actual risk analysis
- Eliminate human error from manual entry
Real-World Impact: A Week Transformed
Before AI:
- 60% of time spent on data extraction
- Constant copy-pasting and formula fixing
- Missed red flags due to fatigue
After AI:
- Upload PDFs once, get clean data in seconds
- Focus shifts to insights, not input
- Underwriting timelines reduced by days
Analysts I know have literally cut a full day of work from their weekly process using extraction tools.
It’s Not Just Faster—It’s More Accurate
AI tools reduce:
- Typo risks
- Misclassified entries
- Formatting issues
And because the process is standardized, you get consistent output across analysts and clients—critical for decision-making.
Try It for Yourself
If you're still manually spreading PDFs, you’re leaving time and accuracy on the table.
Try Assess Finance and upload a financial statement. See how quickly you get back a standardized income statement and balance sheet.
You might never go back to manual again.