FinanceBench evidence-page finder

Use this skill when you must point at the exact page of a 10-K or 10-Q that supports an answer, and you want a reproducible citation instead of a guess.

When to use it

A question names a company, a fiscal year and a metric, and you must return the page where that metric is reported.
You already hold the full PDF and can extract page text, but you do not have a vector index or an embedding model available.

Method

Split the PDF into physical pages and keep the page number with every page.
Remove function words, then cut the question into two-word probes. Long whole sentence queries are rejected by coverage-based admission filters, so never use them as the only query.
Search each probe separately against the page index and fuse the results with reciprocal rank fusion (1 / (60 + rank)), summing per page.
Return at most the requested number of distinct pages, ordered by fused score.

Why two-word probes

Short probes keep the admission floor at one matching term. A long question requires a large share of its terms to match before a page is even considered, and evidence pages in financial filings often repeat only a couple of the question's words. On the public FinanceBench PepsiCo slice this raised evidence-page Recall@20 from 0.625 to 0.750.

Limits

Lexical retrieval cannot bridge a semantic gap: a page that reports "one customer accounted for 16% of net revenue" never contains the phrase "customer concentration". Treat a lexical result as a candidate list to verify by reading, and say so when the evidence is only indirect.