Filing Diff
Find what materially changed between this filing and the last one.
Seat
ER/HF · IB · PE
Level
Analyst / Associate
Runtime
~20 min
Output
Material-changes memo with source citations
What this helps you accomplish
Companies bury changes in repetition: risk factors quietly reworded, accounting policies tweaked, segments redefined, legal exposures added. This workflow diffs consecutive filings and separates material changes from boilerplate churn.
Delegate · Verify · Decide
The core L3VLUP principle: AI output is never automatically correct. Know what to hand off, what to check, and what only you can own.
Delegate
AI is good enough to do this.
- • Section-by-section text comparison across both filings
- • Flagging added, deleted and reworded passages
- • Extracting changed accounting estimates into a table
- • Building the citation list with page/section references
Verify
AI accelerates you here, but a professional checks the work.
- • Flagged changes are real changes, not reformatting or renumbering
- • Quoted before/after language is verbatim from each filing
- • Numeric changes aren’t just presentation reclassifications — check the footnote
Decide
Judgment the human owns. This is the skill.
- • Which changes are material to your thesis or deal
- • Whether a new risk factor is lawyer boilerplate or a genuine signal
- • Whether a policy change flatters the numbers — and what to do about it
Inputs required
- Current filing (10-K / 10-Q / annual report)
- Prior comparable filing
- Focus areas if any: risk factors, segments, accounting policies, legal
The workflow
- 1
Align the documents
Match sections between filings — companies reorder sections precisely when they change them.
- 2
Diff the language
Risk factors, MD&A, accounting policies, commitments and contingencies. New paragraphs and deleted paragraphs matter more than edits.
- 3
Diff the numbers
Restatements, reclassifications, segment redefinitions, changes in estimates (useful lives, reserves, assumptions).
- 4
Rank materiality
Score each change: does it affect earnings power, risk profile, or disclosure quality? Discard formatting churn.
- 5
Write it up
Memo ordered by materiality, each item with the exact before/after language and page reference.
Run this skill
Any listed company, anywhere. Ticker or name.
Quality checklist
The output isn’t done until every box ticks.
- Every item cites section + page in both filings
- Changes ranked by materiality, not document order
- At least one "nothing changed here and that itself is notable" observation where relevant