finvariant

Deterministic integrity checks for financial statements.

Give finvariant income statement, balance sheet and cash flow data; it verifies the accounting invariants - the balance sheet balances, the cash flow ties to the balance sheet, subtotals foot, and the three statements articulate - and returns a structured, auditable report. It verifies; it does not parse, fetch or build statements.

Motivation

Python has plenty of libraries to retrieve statements (financetoolkit, the SEC tools) and to build models (DCF templates, FP&A scripts). What none of them do is check that a set of statements or a model is internally consistent: that assets equal liabilities plus equity, that the cash flow's ending cash matches the balance sheet, that retained earnings roll forward by net income less dividends, that every subtotal foots. That check is exactly what a spreadsheet silently gets wrong - and surveys put an error in the large majority of business spreadsheets.

finvariant encodes those invariants as deterministic, testable rules. The same thing a large language model cannot be trusted to get right (consistent arithmetic across linked statements), a small library can guarantee. Every result is one report: a verdict, the exact failing checks with expected vs actual, and provenance, so a verification can be reproduced and audited later.

pip install finvariant

No runtime dependencies.

Usage

Catch an error:

import finvariant as fv

s = fv.Statements(
    periods=["FY2024"],
    balance_sheet={"FY2024": {
        "total_assets": 540,          # should be 538
        "total_liabilities": 158,
        "total_equity": 380,
    }},
)

r = fv.check(s)
r.ok            # False
print(r.summary())
# finvariant audit - 2026-...
#   1 checks run, 0 passed, 1 failed, 0 skipped
#   [ERROR] EQ.accounting_equation assets = liabilities + equity (FY2024): expected 538, got 540, off by 2
# Verdict: FAIL - statements do not tie out

Real statements tie out (Apple FY2024, from the 10-K):

s = fv.Statements(
    periods=["FY2024"],
    income_statement={"FY2024": {
        "revenue": 391035, "cogs": 210352, "gross_profit": 180683,
        "operating_expenses": 57467, "operating_income": 123216,
        "other_income": 269, "pretax_income": 123485, "tax": 29749,
        "net_income": 93736,
    }},
    balance_sheet={"FY2024": {
        "total_current_assets": 152987, "total_non_current_assets": 211993,
        "total_assets": 364980,
        "total_current_liabilities": 176392, "total_non_current_liabilities": 131638,
        "total_liabilities": 308030,
        "common_stock": 83276, "retained_earnings": -19154,
        "accumulated_oci": -7172, "total_equity": 56950,
    }},
)
fv.check(s).ok          # True

The report carries named findings, counts, ok, summary() and a JSON-safe to_dict() with provenance (version, input hash, timestamp).

What it checks

Provide only the fields you have: a check whose inputs are missing is reported as skipped, never failed. Tolerances absorb the rounding in statements reported in whole millions.

Status

Version 0.1.0. Single entity, single currency, one or more periods, in a canonical schema. The Statements input and AuditReport output are the contract and are append-only from here.

Roadmap

Out of scope: retrieving statements (see financetoolkit, the SEC tools), building or forecasting models, ratio analysis, consolidation and currency translation.

License

MIT. Written and maintained by Atakan Arikan, MSc Student at Tsinghua University and Politecnico di Milano.