I have been out of IB for almost a year, but cannot shake this reoccurring nightmare: people asking me to build models from financials in PDF. It was cute at first, but has quickly grown burdensome as my industry has complex financials (e.g. dozens of line items just for revenue and 30+ year projections). Please help me keep my sanity.
What is the best software for converting PDFs to Excel? Cost is of no concern to me, but it has to be a software package that I can install on my computer.
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You can use Able2Extract or PDF2XL.
Or I can do it for you and we can arrange payment in workout supplements.
I've looked into this too. The best solution I could find: an intern.
There are software packages but since you say cost is not a problem for you I recommend an outsource group to India. My team uses an outsource company in India for $1,800 / month to do literally every mundane thing you can imagine. We have pre-built like 100 company and news screens with them and they just send us weekly one-off reports, they screen massive company lists for us and yes, they will turn around any PDF financial statement document withing about 24 hours. They also tend to do this stuff while you're sleeping given time zones.
It's a different type of solution but for my team it's low cost to outsource stuff that isn't super time sensitive.
Assuming that the pdf's you're looking at aren't images, you do realize that within adobe reader if you hold down alt it will allow you to highlight any column in a straight line by selecting with your mouse (regardless of any formatting), for easy copy pasting into excel...Doing that should cut down your time by like 20x vs manually typing out numbers or trying to organize an unformatted mess
As a poster above alluded to no software solution will be 100% accurate. You're better off with either a quasi-manual approach or farming it out to some other humans