Finance
9 Minutes

Create a Financial Co-Pilot that Analyzes Annual Reports, KPIs, and Trends | Knolli

Published on
October 28, 2025
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Finance teams spend hours combing through PDFs, Excel sheets, and filings just to extract key ratios and trends. What if your reports analyzed themselves?

That’s where Knolli’s AI-powered financial co-pilot comes in — a secure assistant that reads annual reports, extracts KPIs, summarizes MD&A sections, and even drafts your next investor update in minutes.

This guide walks you through how to build your own Financial Co-Pilot using Knolli, designed for CFOs, controllers, and FP&A teams who want accurate insights without spreadsheets or manual reconciliations.

Table of Contents

Why You Need a Financial Co-Pilot

Manual report analysis is a silent time drain.

Financial analysts waste an average of 12 hours per week consolidating PDFs and statements.
CFOs often wait days for summary decks or KPI visuals.
Analysts juggle Excel formulas, pivot tables, and version chaos.

With an AI financial co-pilot, you can:
✅ Analyze hundreds of pages of reports in seconds.
✅ Automatically extract KPIs like CAC, LTV, NRR, and burn multiple.
✅ Generate visual trends, summaries, and MD&A highlights instantly.
✅ Keep all financial data private and compliant.

What You’ll Build

Finance teams waste an average of 12 hours per week compiling reports manually (FP&A Trends, 2025). With a financial co-pilot, teams cut reporting time by up to 85%, turning days of work into minutes.

You’ll build a co-pilot that can:

  • Automatically extract KPIs from PDFs and Excel exports.
  • Summarize MD&A sections with context and tone awareness.
  • Generate charts for revenue, margin, and cash flow trends.
  • Operate within a private, secure workspace for your finance team.

See More: AI tool for Fractional CFOs: Knolli’s AI Finance Co-Pilot Studio

Step 1: Upload and Normalize Annual Reports for Automated KPI Extraction

Upload your company’s or clients’ financial reports. These can be annual reports, 10-K filings, quarterly summaries, or consolidated statements. Knolli automatically extracts tables and text from PDFs, Word files, or Excel sheets and converts them into structured, machine-readable data.

Example:
Drop in “FY2024_Annual_Report.pdf.” Knolli parses income statements, balance sheets, and cash flow tables and formats them into a unified dataset.

You can also connect Google Drive or internal folders to auto-sync new reports as they’re added.

Step 2: How Does a Financial Co-Pilot Extract KPIs Automatically?

Once uploaded, Knolli’s Ratio Calculator identifies and computes critical performance metrics without formulas or templates.

Profitability: Gross Margin, Operating Margin, Net Margin
Liquidity: Current Ratio, Quick Ratio, Days of Cash
Efficiency: Asset Turnover, Working Capital Ratio
Growth: YoY Revenue, EBITDA CAGR, Free Cash Flow

Example Workflow:
Ask: “Show revenue growth and margin change from FY22 to FY24 for Microsoft and Apple.”
Knolli auto-creates a comparative table, charts both metrics, and flags anomalies in operating margins.

You can also tag KPIs that matter to investors, like Rule of 40 or Burn Multiple, to track them automatically.

Ready to build your own Financial Co-Pilot?

Create a private AI finance assistant that can analyze annual reports, extract KPIs, and summarize MD&A sections securely. Deploy your co-pilot in a private workspace, visualize performance trends, and maintain full data privacy.

Build Your Financial Co-Pilot

Step 3: Summarize Management Commentary (MD&A)

Upload the MD&A or management letter section of your annual report. Knolli interprets tone, key themes, and risk factors using its context-aware model.

Example Queries:
“Summarize the CEO’s comments on product growth.”
“Highlight all mentions of supply chain risk.”
“Compare FY23 MD&A tone to FY24.”

Instead of reading 50 pages of text, your co-pilot gives you a structured summary with sentiment classification and extracts direct quotes for your board report.

Knolli doesn’t just analyze. It visualizes.

Ask your co-pilot to generate presentation-ready trend charts.

Example Queries:
“Plot revenue growth vs. net income margin for FY22–FY24.”
“Show cash flow trend and variance by quarter.”
“Compare expense growth to revenue growth YoY.”

Within seconds, Knolli creates visuals that can be exported to Google Slides or saved to your next board deck, eliminating hours of manual formatting.

Step 5: Share Securely or Monetize Your Financial Co-Pilot

Knolli gives you complete control over how your financial analysis is used and shared.

Private Mode: Keep all analyses and reports internal to your finance or FP&A team.
Client Mode: Share limited access with stakeholders, investors, or clients.
Monetized Mode: Offer access to your co-pilot as a subscription-based knowledge product, ideal for consultants and fractional CFOs.

Example Workflow:
Upload “Q4_2024_Results.xlsx.”
Ask: “Summarize profitability trends and generate slides.”
Knolli outputs KPI tables, margin charts, MD&A highlights, and a ready-to-send investor update in under 15 minutes.

Who Uses a Financial Co-Pilot?

CFOs: Generate rolling quarterly reviews in minutes.
Analysts: Compare competitor filings side-by-side.
Consultants: Create white-labeled finance copilots for clients.
Founders: Track investor metrics like burn multiple and runway.

Knolli vs. Other Financial Analysis Tools

Most financial copilots solve only one part of the equation. Microsoft Copilot for Finance focuses on Excel automation. Datarails and Cube specialize in FP&A workflows. AlphaSense and Boosted.ai power market research.

Knolli is different. It brings everything together.

Knolli acts as a CFO-grade co-pilot that reads your annual reports, extracts KPIs, summarizes MD&A sections, and builds board-ready presentations from a private, customizable workspace.

Where other tools focus on automation, Knolli focuses on understanding. It doesn’t just read data; it interprets your financial story and turns it into insights, ratios, and investor decks automatically.

Unlike traditional tools that rely on public cloud APIs, Knolli supports on-premise or private-cloud deployment, making it the only AI finance co-pilot designed for teams handling sensitive or investor-facing data.

In short, Knolli does what your finance stack can’t: combine automation, storytelling, and security in a single workspace.

Why Knolli Leads the Market

  1. Unified Workflow: From P&L parsing to KPI mapping to slide generation, Knolli automates every step between your raw statements and your boardroom deck.
  2. Privacy by Design: Every upload is encrypted and isolated, with support for open-source LLMs like Llama 3.3 for private processing.
  3. Contextual Intelligence: Knolli reads the entire document, not snippets, for accurate trend detection and ratio analysis.
  4. Custom Monetization: Consultants and CFOs can turn their copilots into subscription-based client dashboards.
  5. Speed & Accessibility: A full CFO studio starting at just $39/month, compared to enterprise-only pricing from legacy tools.
Comparison Summary
Feature Knolli Microsoft 365 Copilot Datarails Vena AlphaSense
KPI Extraction Fully automated from PDFs, Excel, and MD&A Excel formulas only Excel-native automation AI variance analysis External filings only
MD&A Summarization Context, sentiment, and key drivers Prompt-based summaries Manual text extraction Generative narrative Market summaries only
Multi-File Analysis Compare reports and entities Single workbook scope Multi-source aggregation Connected data model External docs only
Visualization & Decks One-click Google Slides and emails Excel charts only Built-in dashboards Excel and Teams visuals External visualization
Privacy & Deployment Encrypted, on-prem or private cloud Microsoft Cloud SaaS only Cloud only Cloud
Monetization Build subscription copilots No No No No
Pricing 💲$39/month 💲Enterprise 💲Quote-based 💲Enterprise 💲Enterprise

Most finance copilots either automate spreadsheet tasks or summarize documents. Knolli does both, adding context, privacy, and speed.

It connects your raw financial data to actionable insight:

  • Reads reports like an analyst
  • Explains performance like a CFO
  • Presents results like a storyteller

With encrypted private-cloud deployment, contextual MD&A analysis, and built-in monetization, Knolli delivers the complete financial co-pilot experience others can’t.

See More: Top 15 AI Tools for CFOs and Fractional CFOs in 2025

Private Deployment

Want a Private AI Financial Co-Pilot?

Deploy Knolli in your private cloud or on-prem environment for full control and zero data leakage. Ideal for CFOs, controllers, and finance teams handling sensitive or investor-facing data.

Request a Demo

Beyond Analysis: What to Build Next

Once your Financial Co-Pilot handles KPI extraction and summaries, you can expand it into:

  • Investor KPI Reporting Co-Pilot: Automate CAC, LTV, and payback calculations.
  • Budget & Scenario Planning Co-Pilot: Compare best- and worst-case outcomes in minutes.
  • Board Deck Co-Pilot: Turn forecasts into polished Google Slides with speaker notes.

Explore these next in the CFO Co-Pilot Series to scale your entire finance workflow.

FAQs

What is a Financial Co-Pilot?
It’s an AI assistant that reads and summarizes annual reports, calculates KPIs, and generates investor-ready insights.

Can AI extract KPIs automatically from PDFs?
Yes, Knolli can parse financial statements and calculate KPIs such as margin, liquidity, and efficiency ratios instantly.

How secure is my financial data?
Knolli encrypts all files and offers on-prem deployment for full data control.

Can consultants monetize their Co-Pilots?
Yes, you can create subscription-based or client-facing copilots for finance analysis.