Extract a municipality's published balance sheet

Why use this

1. A reader seeking municipal balance-sheet figures may find several statements with similar labels but different reporting scopes. Extracting a number without its year, unit or statement heading can create a misleading comparison.

2. A source-linked extraction sheet could preserve the requested figures alongside their exact reporting context. The reader could inspect the original page and distinguish missing information from a value that was merely hard to locate.

Why an agent / simpler alternative

Useful judgment

Locate relevant tables and distinguish similarly named figures across statements and periods.

Simpler alternative

Read the published table directly when its location and definitions are already clear.

Unsuitable when

The request requires judging municipal financial health from a few extracted figures.

Proposed inputs

1. Name

   Extraction question

   Owner

   Researcher

   Minimum scope

   Municipality, reporting year and requested statement labels

   Quality check

   Clarify whether a particular fund or consolidated scope is intended.

2. Name

   Official annual-report copy

   Owner

   Researcher

   Minimum scope

   Relevant PDF and publication identity

   Quality check

   Confirm the municipality, year, page numbering and whether a restatement is shown.

Access and setup — proposed or unknown

Proposed minimum

1. Read-only supplied public report and a private extraction worksheet.

Compatibility unknowns

1. Unknown: exact runtime, PDF extraction quality and current official-report availability.

External actions requiring approval

1. Publishing financial conclusions or distributing restricted annotated material.

Expected deliverable and review checks

Proposed artifact

Requested figures with original labels, units, year, statement scope and PDF page references.

Critical checks

1. Numbers come from the intended reporting column and statement.

2. Fund balance and differently defined totals are not silently substituted for each other.

Missing output evidence

No new workflow run or output inspection was performed for this overlay.

Failure signals and proposed responses

1. Signal

   The adjacent prior-year column is read as the current year.

   Why it matters

   The extraction could answer the wrong reporting question.

   Proposed response

   Check headings and retain the selected column context.

2. Signal

   A table uses scaled units that are omitted from the summary.

   Why it matters

   Readers could misinterpret the size of the figures.

   Proposed response

   Include the published unit scale with every extracted amount.

Effort and cost — unknown

Setup work

1. Identify the authoritative report and requested scope.

Ongoing review

1. Visually verify figures and citations against the original pages.

Unknowns

1. Unknown: scan quality, restatements and manual-verification effort.

First check — proposed, unexecuted

Status

proposed_unexecuted

Synthetic fixture

An invented table has current/prior-year columns, a stated scale and separate fund-level totals.

Acceptance checks

1. The extraction plan preserves all context fields.

2. No financial-health conclusion is inferred.

Stop conditions

1. The intended scope or a critical label is unreadable.

Limits

1. Editorial extraction design; a synthetic table check is not an audit or validated financial analysis.