Financial statement normalization

Accounting statements are not built for valuation. They are built to be auditable and comparable, and those goals push them away from economic substance in three specific ways. Research spending is an investment that the accountant expensed. Leases are debt that sat off the balance sheet for decades and still get reported on rules nobody trusts. One-time items sit inside operating income and get relabelled by management every year.

This skill applies the corrections and then derives what follows from them: cash flows, the capital base, and the return earned on that capital. Every number the script produces is a pure transform of numbers you supply. Which items are non-recurring, and how long research takes to pay off in this business, are your calls.

The script

resources/normalize.py — pure standard library, no installation needed. Every subcommand takes JSON on stdin (or --in FILE) and prints JSON.