Note: this site and the author does NOT have any financial relationship with the service provider being reviewed.
THREE POINT OVERVIEW:
I asked Shortcut to build out a granular revenue and cost forecast for Vail Resort Inc’s main operating segment.
Shortcut needs a lot of guidance on determining key revenue drivers, building out the structure of a granular revenue forecast, and modeling costs appropriately.
Even for a simple business like Vail, there are nuances in the business model that were not picked up by Shortcut for modeling purposes.
INTRODUCTION:
Over the past week I tested out Shortcut AI (link), an AI agent for Excel. This is the second review on Shortcut that I’m posting this week.
A quick recap - in my first write up on Shortcut (here), I assessed the tool’s ability to pull the current capital structure and historical financials for Vial Resorts Inc from its latest 10-K. As the first write-up showed, Shortcut was surprisingly good at pulling capital structure information but consistently made basic errors in pulling historical financials. On the bright side, I think that these issues should be fixable (they are not untraceable hallucinations). I will be testing Shortcut again soon and will update readers to the extent that there are improvements in these areas.
In this week’s second review, I wanted to test Shortcut’s ability to build a granular revenue and cost forecast if given a model that already includes historical financials. I gave Shortcut the historical segment financials for Vail’s “Mountain segment” which consists primarily of the Company’s ski resort/area operations. I also uploaded the Company’s most recent investor presentation which included additional KPIs not included in the 10-K and a press release that detailed management’s guidance for the next fiscal year. The goal was to test Shortcut’s ability to model the segment in the same detailed way that a buyside analyst would be expected to think about the business and build projections.
REVIEW OF RESULTS:
First, we uploaded an excel sheet with the below segment financials (Figure 1) and wrote a prompt asking Shortcut to use these financials along with any relevant information in the uploaded FY 2025 10-K and latest Investor Presentation to come up with a granular revenue and cost build for the segment. I know that this is a lot to expect from a very nascent tool - but when its promos are going viral with taglines suggesting imminent mass replacement of analysts, I think it’s fair to at least test it by assigning real work a buyside analyst might do.