PDPilot
FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Short answers for credit analysts, reviewers and integration teams evaluating PDPilot.

PDPilot › FAQ

Getting started

What do I need to analyze an annual report?

The report as a PDF and the positions of three statements in the file: balance sheet, income statement and cash-flow statement — proposed automatically on upload for you to confirm. Plus the basics: issuer name, period end, currency, and whether the statements are consolidated or statutory. Note pages for the borrowings and lease notes are optional.

Which page numbers are entered — the printed ones?

No — the page's position in the PDF file (1 = the first page of the file). The number printed in the report's footer is usually different, often by a dozen pages or more. The upload proposal pre-fills the positions; if a figure comes back blank or strange, a mixed-up page number is the most common reason.

Do I have to tell it "figures in millions"?

No. The scale note on the statement page is read automatically. How figures are displayed — millions, thousands or as printed — is a separate choice in the interface.

Can it read scanned reports?

Yes. A statement page without a text layer gets an OCR text layer and is read by the same engine. Rows from scanned pages carry an OCR tag with the page's recognition confidence.

Can it start from an ESEF or Companies House filing instead of a PDF?

Yes. Search the public ESEF index by LEI or name, or Companies House by number or name, and import the filing; or drop a saved inline-XBRL, ESEF package or xBRL-JSON file. The tagged facts become the same standardized spread, ratios, rating and memo.

Understanding the numbers

Why does a total differ from the total printed in the PDF?

Because every total is added up from the line items you can see — never copied from the printed total. A tiny gap is rounding. A larger gap means a line was missed or misplaced, and that is shown as a finding, not hidden. Expand the rows to see what was captured, then fix it with a re-mapping, a correction or an added line.

Why do all issuers show the same row names?

Statements are standardized to one fixed vocabulary so that issuers and years are directly comparable. Nothing is lost: expand any row to see the original lines exactly as printed, and click the page link to see the spot on the PDF page.

Net income carries a warning flag — is the number wrong?

Not necessarily. The flag means the P&L walk-down (revenue to net income) could not be fully reconciled from the captured lines — usually one line was missed in an unusual layout. Verify against the page and add or correct the missing line; the flag clears when the walk-down adds up.

Is a language model used to read the figures?

No. Extraction and derivation are deterministic, verifiable rules. Every figure is computed, traceable and reproducible rather than generated.

Corrections

What happens when I correct a value?

The correction is marked permanently with who made it and what the engine originally read. The engine's value is kept and can be restored with one click; the audit log records every step. Corrections belong to that one document — they do not change other years, other issuers or how the engine reads the next report.

What happens to corrections if the document is re-run?

They are re-applied wherever the freshly extracted lines still match. Any correction that no longer fits is listed at the top of the document to re-do or discard — nothing is silently dropped.

Review and approval

Who approves a submission?

Any user with the reviewer or admin role — except the person who submitted it. The four-eyes rule is enforced by the platform.

What exactly is approved?

The figures as submitted: a permanent snapshot is stored at approval. If the document is later reopened and changed, the approved snapshot remains viewable exactly as it was approved, and by whom.

Rating and time series

How is the indicative rating computed?

From four ratios — Debt/EBITDA, FFO/Debt, EBITDA/Interest cover and FOCF/Debt — blended into a score and mapped to the AAA…CCC ladder, with overlays (net-cash issuers cap at AA; low extraction confidence costs a notch). It is a simplified, methodology-inspired screening signal, not a credit rating and not a replacement for a full credit assessment.

Does the rating update when I correct a figure?

Yes. Saving a correction recomputes the ratios and the rating immediately, so it always reflects the figures on screen.

What does the multi-year issuer view show?

All analyzed years of an issuer side by side — balance-sheet and P&L series plus the derived ratios — computed live from the same line items the documents show. If the years mix consolidated and statutory figures, or currencies, the view warns prominently.

Security and deployment

Is what users do on the platform audited?

Yes. Every mapping change, value correction, added line, revert, submission and approval decision is written to a permanent log — who, when, what, and what it replaced. Audit entries are never edited or deleted. Administrative actions are logged the same way.

How is sign-in secured?

Two-step sign-in: password plus the current code from an authenticator app, with recovery codes. Roles are analyst, reviewer and admin; higher roles include the lower ones.

Where does client data live?

In a dedicated, single-tenant instance per institution — in a private environment or on-premises. Client data is processed within that instance and is never blended across clients.

How is PDPilot integrated with existing systems?

Over a documented HTTP API with an OpenAPI contract: extraction, page proposal, the standardized view, issuer series, approvals and the credit memo. An integration kit for Salesforce-based lending platforms such as nCino is available.

See it on your own annual reports

A live demonstration environment is available on request — bring the PDFs your analysts spread today.