A Swedish årsredovisning for a medium or large company is rarely short. While a small local AB (aktiebolag) might only file 10 pages, a growing mid-sized company often files 30 to 60 pages, and a large listed corporation can easily publish 80 to 200 pages. Reading one in full takes hours. Reading several during a busy season takes days.

This article is a practical walkthrough of how to use AI to get through one faster, without uploading the file to a cloud service. The example we use is SoloScan because it is what we make, but the same general approach works with any local AI tool. The point is the workflow, not the brand.

We assume you already know what an årsredovisning is and how to read one manually. The AI is here to make you faster, not to replace your professional judgment.

Before you start

Two things to set up before you analyze anything.

1. Make sure the PDF is searchable. If the report is a scanned document (printed, signed, then scanned back in), the text is not yet machine-readable. SoloScan will OCR it automatically, but the OCR pass adds 30 to 90 seconds to the first load. Most modern årsredovisningar from listed companies are born-digital PDFs with a real text layer, so this is rarely an issue.

2. Know what you are looking for. Open-ended questions like "tell me everything about this company" produce open-ended answers that are hard to use. Specific questions produce specific answers. Before you load the file, write down the three to five things you actually want to know. We will use those as the prompts.

The workflow

Open SoloScan. Drop in the PDF. Wait for the document to load. Then ask questions one at a time, from broadest to most specific.

Step 1: orient yourself

The first question is always the same. It builds your mental map of the document.

"Give me a structural summary of this report. What are the main sections, and roughly how many pages does each section cover?"

The answer tells you where the management discussion is, where the financial statements start, where the notes are, and where the auditor's report sits. Even if you have read a hundred årsredovisningar, this question is useful because it confirms that the AI has loaded the document correctly. If the answer is vague or wrong, the OCR failed or the file is too large for the current context window. Stop and check before going further.

Step 2: the management story

Most årsredovisningar open with a forvaltningsberättelse (management report) where the company describes the business year in its own words. This section is usually two to five pages.

"Summarize the management report in 200 words. What does management say drove the year's results? What risks do they highlight for the coming year?"

A 200-word summary is short enough to read in 30 seconds but long enough to capture the texture. You can adjust the length up or down based on how detailed your review needs to be.

Step 3: the numbers

The financial statements are the core of the document. The AI cannot replace your reading of them, but it can highlight things worth your attention.

"From the income statement, give me revenue, operating profit, and net profit for the current year and the previous year. What is the percentage change in each?"

"From the balance sheet, give me total assets, total equity, and total liabilities for the current year and the previous year. Has the equity ratio (soliditet) materially changed?"

"From the cash flow statement, what was operating cash flow, investing cash flow, and financing cash flow? Are there any large one-time items?"

Three questions, three answers, and you now have a numerical skeleton of the year. This takes the AI under a minute. Pulling the same numbers manually takes ten minutes if the report is well-organized and longer if it is not.

Step 4: the notes

The notes (noter) are where the interesting work usually hides. This is where accounting judgments are disclosed, where contingencies are mentioned, and where related-party transactions show up.

"List every note in this report and give me a one-sentence summary of each. Highlight any notes that involve accounting estimates, contingent liabilities, related-party transactions, or going-concern considerations."

The output is a structured table of contents for the notes section, with the high-risk items called out. You then go read the flagged notes manually. The AI has done the triage work.

Step 5: the auditor's report

The auditor's report (revisionsberättelse) is short, but important.

"Summarize the auditor's report. Is the opinion unqualified? Are there any emphasis-of-matter paragraphs, key audit matters, or qualifications?"

If the auditor has flagged something, the AI will surface it. If the opinion is a standard unqualified one, the answer will tell you that too.

Step 6: targeted follow-ups

By now you have the structural map of the document. The remaining work is whatever your specific engagement requires. Some examples of useful follow-up prompts:

"Find every mention of 'goodwill' in the report. For each, quote the surrounding paragraph and tell me what page it is on."

"Does the company describe any acquisitions during the year? If yes, what was acquired, when, and at what price?"

"What is the company's revenue recognition policy? Has it changed compared to the prior year?"

"Are there any disclosures related to GDPR fines, environmental liabilities, or pending litigation?"

Each of these would take a careful manual read of the full report to answer. The AI does each in seconds. The answers are not always perfect, but they are accurate often enough to be useful as a first pass.

Where the AI gets things wrong

To be honest about limitations:

Numbers. Local AI models occasionally misread numbers in tables, especially when columns are tightly packed or when the PDF uses unusual layout. Always verify any number that matters by checking the source page yourself. The AI tells you where to look. It does not replace the looking.

Subtlety. The AI can summarize a paragraph. It cannot tell you whether the company has subtly changed the way it describes a policy compared to last year, unless you give it last year's report too. Year-over-year comparisons require feeding both reports in.

Specifically Swedish accounting nuance. Llama 3.2 is a general-purpose model, not a Swedish-accounting-trained model. It knows the basics. It will not catch the kind of subtle K3-vs-K4 framing that an experienced Swedish auditor would notice. Use it for the heavy lifting, not the judgment call.

What this saves you

An experienced auditor reading an 80-page årsredovisning carefully takes around two hours. Using the workflow above on the same document takes around 30 minutes of AI prompting plus 30 to 45 minutes of targeted manual reading on the flagged sections.

That is roughly a 40 to 50 percent time saving on the first-pass read. Over a busy season with 20 reports, the time saved adds up to a full working week.

And because SoloScan runs the analysis on your own computer, none of the client's information leaves your machine. The same workflow with ChatGPT or Copilot would require uploading the report to a third-party cloud, which most engagement agreements do not allow.

If you want to try this workflow, SoloScan is free to download and analyzes the first 1,000 characters of any document on the free plan. Pick a report you would normally spend two hours on, run through the steps above, and see whether the time saved is worth it.