Heron Data
p/heron-data
We automate document-heavy workflows using AI
Jamie Parker
Heron Data: AutoSpread — Standardise any chart of accounts in minutes
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Say 'goodbye' to 'stare and compare' manual spreading of management accounts, tax returns, balance sheets, or P&Ls. Upload them to Heron via our portal, email, API and receive normalised, clean, and structured output piped directly to where you need it.
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Jamie Parker
👋 Hi Hunters, Jamie here from Heron Data. We partner with 100+ Banks, Fintechs, and other Business Lenders to automate mindless repetitive processes like parsing bank statements & application forms into your CRM. Financial statements are essential to most banks underwriting process but a massive pain to parse or 'spread'. Tax returns, balance sheets, and P&Ls provide unique insight into a company's financial health - they are the source for calculating datapoints like inventory turnover, quick ratio, and debt:assets, components of most credit models. Our customers can often reach a speedy lending decision once they have the datapoints they need from financials. However, unless they can hook into a customer's accounting platform directly with a tool like Codat or Rutter the only way to calculate (or 'spread') these ratios reliably from financials in PDF or Excel is by hand. Spreading financials for each company takes them 20-90 minutes... and it's really boring. Until now that is - say hello to AutoSpread! 🤖 Use ML, not human endurance to spread financials. Send what you have to Heron in the format you have it and get it back ready for your credit models or human judgement to analyse 🔌 Heron can ingest docs via email, API, or portal. We'll classify docs, parse or spread them, and push the results into wherever you want them e.g. CRMs like SalesForce, your own propriety software, or an email inbox as an Excel attachment 🗣️ Our software works with financials in most languages - never google translate Dutch line items again 💯 Output quality is our problem, not yours. We stand by our results and will review the docs we can't validate to be correct so you can spend your time on better things OK, but why does all this matter? A high degree of manual intervention makes underwriting a small commercial loan expensive and reduces access to credit, especially for smaller (<$250,000) loans according to research from FinRegLab. This means less access to affordable credit for small businesses, less growth, and more SMBs going under. What's more, humans are amazing at complex processes that require thought and judgement - like making an underwriting decision after reviewing all the data. We are terrible at copy and pasting numbers from a PDF into an Excel all day. Focus on the former, let us automate the latter and make financial services better for businesses :).
Richard Song
Hats off, @jamie_parker! AutoSpread is such a lifesaver for anyone buried in financial statements. The ML-powered approach to spreading is brilliant—goodbye to manual data entry! I'm curious, how does AutoSpread handle extremely large datasets? Does it maintain the same level of speed and accuracy?
Jamie Parker
@renchu_song Yep! Doesn't really matter how big the file is.
Eric Yang
Kudos to the Heron Data team for AutoSpread! This tool is going to make a significant difference in underwriting processes, especially for small business loans. @jamie_parker
Pradhumn Vijayvargiya
My data scientist friends would love this
Jamie Parker
@pradhumn_vijayvargiya Want to connect me with them?
Kyrylo Silin
Hey Jamie, How does AutoSpread handle variations in formatting or non-standard line items in financial statements? What languages does it currently support? Congrats on the launch!
Jamie Parker
@kyrylosilin thanks! We can handle PDF, .xls, and other formats. Non-standard formats are fine. We have done the most training on English docs but other languages actually work quite well too.
Hannah Travis
I’m all for anything that makes working with management accounts and balance sheets easier. This looks super efficient.
Noah Christopher Bennett
Sounds like a really useful tool, Jamie! Just checked it out and it seems super helpful for automating those tedious tasks. Congrats on the launch! Looking forward to seeing how it helps streamline the lending process.
Jamie Parker
@noahchristopherbennett Thanks so much for the support!
Mitia
A really impressive solution! Upoted!
Jamie Parker
@mitia Appreciate it!
Nitesh Jamod
Great solution, @jamie_parker ! Happy to see AutoSpread reduce cash flow analysis manual work. Looking forward to upvoting!
Jamie Parker
Julien
So now we're trusting an algorithm to handle our financial statements, seems a bit risky, don't you think, where's the human touch, the oversight, the accountability, I'm all for tech but this feels like inviting trouble, 🤔
Jamie Parker
@peoplefirstjulien Humans can review the output before progressing the application if they like. The goal isn't to eliminate human input if it's required, it's to make them 100x faster so they just review rather than spread from scratch.
Eva Paz
I see the potential for this tool but why not add a feature to automate more complex financial analyses, also sometimes it's scary to think about relying so much on AI to handle such sensitive data, maybe more customization options would help users feel more in control?
Jamie Parker
@eva_paz Users can recategorise line-items and manually review spreads in the tool!
Sami Mallek
I can see how having clean and structured data straight from uploads could save time, but isn't relying on automation risky for sensitive financial info, what if it misinterprets something or there's a glitch, feels like putting a lot of trust on a system that might not always get it right
Jamie Parker
@aimanager24 If you're concerned about that you can leave a human in the loop to review the output :)
Zajin dacos
I’m excited about heron data potential to transform the way we handle financial statements
Jamie Parker
@zajin_dacos How are you using financial statements today?
Yahya Rogers
Heron’s ability to handle various file formats and rapidly process financial statements is impressive.
Jamie Parker
@yahya_rogers Appreciate it!
Itohan blessing Eigbadon
The ability to ingest files from multiple sources, including email and API, is super convenient. Plus, the structured output in formats like CSV and JSON makes it even easier to integrate into our existing systems.
Abel Hess
I’m interested in trying this out. How customizable is the output format for different types of financial documents?
Jamie Parker
@abel_hess Awesome! Drop me a note on jamie@herondata.io and I'll get you an account set up. Output is pretty customisable - just share your template you need the financials spread into!
Didier Platel
Not sure if we really need another tool that promises to simplify everything, I mean, how many of these actually live up to their hype, right, the idea is intriguing but let's see if it can really make a differencs or just another flashy app we'll forget about in a month
Jamie Parker
@clprojectguru Let's see! Our customers find it useful :)
Nevil Ling
This will surely streamline the underwriting process for many businesses.
Jamie Parker
@nevil_ling Fingers crossed!
Cox Dusatko
Hi Jamie, AutoSpread sounds like a much-needed solution for financial document handling. Congratulations on the launch! Regarding handling variations in financial statement formatting, how does AutoSpread ensure accuracy? Additionally, which languages are currently supported?
Jamie Parker
@cox_dusatko Primary support is for English-language. We do reconciliation checks on the documents to ensure we have extracted and categorise line items accurately.