In today's data-driven landscape, the ability to extract meaningful insights from raw financial data is paramount for strategic decision-making. Perplexity offers a powerful solution, transforming complex datasets into clear, actionable business intelligence. By leveraging advanced analytical capabilities, Perplexity empowers organizations to move beyond mere data collection, enabling them to identify trends, forecast performance, and uncover hidden opportunities that drive growth and efficiency.

In this tutorial, we show you how to analyze messy financial reports, generate strategic scenarios, automatically build a decision brief, and integrate public data for comparison. 

This tutorial will guide you on how to:

• Clean messy financial documents
• Analyze the data with intent
• Generate strategic scenarios
• Build a decision brief automatically
• Compare the report with public data

Let's get started!

Step 1 - Clean messy financial documents

The first step is to clean up messy financial documents, such as profit and loss (P&L) or cash flow reports. The unstructured reports often pose a challenge when trying to make sense of all the numbers. 

Go to Perplexity and log in to an existing account or create a new one. 

Pro Tip: It's better to get a Pro account for in-depth analysis. 

Upload your messy reports. It can be a profit and loss (P&L) report or a daily cash flow report. Click the Attach icon at the bottom right of the chat box and select Local Files if the files are on your computer. For online documents, click 'connect files.'

Set the source for your query. Click the globe icon in the bottom right corner of the chat box. Turn on 'Finance.'

Use the following prompt to instruct Perplexity to clean the data. 

Prompt:

Standardize the attached files into a clean table with the following categories: revenue, cost of goods sold, operating expenses, and net income.

That's great. Perplexity cleaned the data and created a table of the entire report. You can download the table by clicking the download icon at the bottom right corner of the generated table. 

Please note that the table is just a sample. When you download the CSV, it will contain all the data from the attached reports. 

Step 2 - Analyze the data with intent

The real value of financial data comes from asking the right questions. You can dig deeper than basic summaries and start thinking like a CEO. Use clever prompting techniques to ask insightful, focused questions that help you identify trends, understand your cash flow, and make more informed decisions for your business.

The next question that will analyze the data pertains to the cost category. Use the following prompt to dig deeper into the data. 

‍Prompt:

Focusing on Nathan's groceries, which cost category is growing fastest over the past 6 months?

That's a good start. Next, we will ask Perplexity to suggest ways to cut costs. 

Prompt;

Where can we reduce costs by 10% without impacting core operations?

It also suggested cost savings by outlining them in a table. 

You can also ask for suggestions based on the uploaded data. 

Prompt:

Are we on track to be cash-flow positive by Q4?

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You can always ask for more suggestions, such as what can be done to achieve cash-flow positivity by Q4, or create an actionable plan to attain cash-flow positivity by Q4. 

Step 3  - Generate strategic scenarios

Once you've got a handle on your numbers, it's time to explore different paths your business could take. You can quickly compare plans, test out assumptions, and see how small changes might impact your results. It's a straightforward way to map out scenarios and determine which direction makes the most sense.

How about finding out what the base case and growth plan were initially for Nathan Groceries in our example? Upload the documents to get some strategic scenarios. 

Attach a base case vs. a growth plan for your business. In our case, we will upload a PDF for Nathan Groceries. 

Now, ask Perplexity to compare the growth and margin trends across both plans. 

Prompt:

Compare the growth and margin trends across both plans. Which one gives a better ROI by Q2 next year?

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That's a good in-depth analysis of the base case and the growth plan. Take a look at the quarterly profit calculation. This provides a good insight into the mechanics of your business. 

Step 4 - Build a decision brief automatically

How about updating your investors with key data that will ease the pressure on you and provide them with a clear picture of the business and its performance? 

Prompt:

Turn these insights into a 5-slide investor update with charts and key takeaways?

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The bar chart was not generated correctly. We instructed Perplexity to regenerate it. 

Paste the contents of this answer into a slide, and it will be ready for your investor to review and analyze. 

Step 5 - Compare the report with public data

Sometimes your numbers aren't enough on their own. To get the full picture, it helps to incorporate public data for context. A smart prompt makes it easy to pull in industry benchmarks, competitor stats, or market trends so you can see how you stack up and make smarter decisions with a broader view.

Prompt: 

Compare our gross margin to industry averages for grocery companies with < $10M ARR.

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You can also tell Perplexity to create a detailed report of the comparison. Attach it to other reports so you and your investors can make an informed decision. 

That's it for this tutorial. These prompts provide ideas on how to utilize Perplexity or other AI services to delve deeper into your data and gain in-depth insights. You can always modify these prompts to suit your needs.