Extraction from filings can invent impossible years — a decimal comma misread as a thousands separator, or a units label ignored. Before multiples run, every financial series passes a deterministic integrity gate that drops those years instead of quietly rewriting them.
What the gate does
- A year where EBITDA > revenue is excluded from the calculation.
- The year is not silently fixed or clamped into a plausible range.
- Excluded years are reported as a provisional data signal.
- The check is deterministic: same inputs → same result.
Why it usually fires
- Decimal-comma misread — "24.45" parsed as "244.5" (or the reverse trap on Czech filings).
- Units mismatch — figures labeled "v tisících Kč" / in thousands CZK treated as full crowns.
- Rarely a legitimate one-off income item — Misano does not verify that case; it still drops the year.
Related guards (not the same gate)
- Margins > 100% from faulty extraction are dropped by a central guard, not clamped.
- Staleness soft/hard gates and the no-EBITDA-carry-forward rule are age and latest-year rules — covered at misano.ai/guides/stale-filings-cannot-make-todays-headline.
- Currency conversion to CZK happens before the engine; integrity runs on the series the engine actually uses.
Where this sits
- Runs on the input series before source and method cascades pick a multiple.
- Part of how-we-value-companies-at-scale §1 integrity — this guide expands the gate in plain language (misano.ai/guides/how-we-value-companies-at-scale).
- Downstream cascades still apply: custom → niche → NACE (misano.ai/guides/custom-then-niche-then-nace) and the triangulated value band (misano.ai/guides/value-band-is-triangulated).
What this is not
- Not a staleness gate — age of the filing is a separate check.
- Not silently fixing OCR or extraction errors into a "corrected" EBITDA.
- Not a rewrite of the full methodology essay — only §1 integrity, focused.
Get started at https://app.misano.ai/login. From €39/month billed annually, 14-day money-back, no sales call. Product path: misano.ai/scout.
See also: misano.ai/guides/stale-filings-cannot-make-todays-headline, misano.ai/guides/how-we-value-companies-at-scale, misano.ai/guides/custom-then-niche-then-nace, and misano.ai/guides/value-band-is-triangulated.