Credit Manager Magazine 9/2021

38 CREDIT MANAGER MAGAZINE WRZESIEŃ / SEPTEMBER 2021 Effective creditworthiness analysis based on financial information Financial statements are a crucial source of information, not only related to own business, but also to other companies on the market. In Poland, these documents comprise typically the balance sheet as well as the profit and loss statement defined according to the Accounting Act [1]. Alternatively, selected companies are allowed (or obliged to) report their financial situation according to the International Accounting Standards/International Financial Reporting Standards (IAS/IFRS) [2]. Tomasz Jastrząb, PhD Technicenter Sp. z o.o. Depending on the type of company, e.g., fi- nancial or non-financial, or its size: micro, small or other, the Accounting Act defines different scope of information that have to be reported in the financial statements. Con- sequently, the amount of useful information that can be extracted from these documents vary between different companies and poses a challenge in effective assessment of their fi- nancial situation and creditworthiness. Nev- ertheless, creditworthiness analysis can cer- tainly be based on the data provided in fi- nancial statements, which allows to calculate a great variety of ratios assessing different aspects of company’s functioning. What is more, certain ratios can be combined to- gether, producing advanced discriminative models, which provide vital hints upon the creditworthiness of the given company. A challenging aspect, especially for automat- ic or semi-automatic analysis of financial information, results from a variety of for- mats in which the statements are published, ranging from Excel spreadsheets and PDF files, through web pages, up to XML files. Let us also note that the accounting soft- ware producing some of these documents (e.g., as *.xlsx and *.pdf files) tend to leave a certain dose of freedom as to the naming conventions and actual structure of the bal- ance sheet and profit and loss statements which adds to the difficulty of automated data processing. Finally, the human-readable data formats are often not well-suited for computer-based processing, while the ma- chine-centered XML format is, in turn, not so human-friendly. Despite the challenges mentioned above, effective semi-automatic analysis of credit- worthiness and company’s financial situa- tion is possible with the use of the eanaliza. pl (https://eanaliza.pl ) system, whose capa- bilities will be discussed in the remaining sections of this article. The system currently supports a few data formats including: • Excel- and PDF-based statements gen- erated from Comarch Optima or Sage Symfonia accounting programs, • Excel-based statements imported from predefined template documents, • XML-based statements for small and other companies (cf. [3]). It is also possible to input the financial state- ment data manually, if all aforementioned formats are unsuitable. The statements in- clude the balance sheet and the comparative version of the profit and loss statement, for at least two and at most eight periods. The basic flow chart of the system is shown in Fig. 1. Fig. 1 Flow chart of the eanaliza.pl system Quick analysis The eanaliza.pl system makes creditworthi- ness analysis fast and easy by providing the financial standing data. The standing com- prises the following ratios: (i) long-term solvency ratio based on equity coverage, (ii) current ratio, (iii) quick ratio, (iv) return on sales (ROS), (v) return on assets (ROA), (vi) return on equity (ROE), (vii) inventories cy- cle in days, (viii) receivables cycle in days, (ix) liabilities cycle in days, and (x) debt ratio. The ratios belong to different groups of ana- lytical ratios, hence they provide comprehen- sive, yet concise view of company’s financial situation. The standing comes in three different flavors. The first one includes only the values of the aforementioned ratios and is suited for the standalone analysis of key performance indi- cators of the given company. The second rep- resentation complements ratio values with EDUCATION