MBABench-2.0: Evaluating AI Agents on Constructing Financial Spreadsheets Beyond Simple Verifiability

Overview & Synopsis

Spreadsheets are the lingua franca of modern finance, driving valuation, forecast, audit, and many other core workflows of the industry. As LLM agents advance to automate knowledge work, spreadsheet construction is a natural and pertinent testbed. However, most existing spreadsheet benchmarks evaluate agents on fill-in-the-blank style tasks, where an agent performs minor edits in otherwise complete spreadsheets. This protocol fails to capture the most central and time-consuming part of the spreadsheet workflow: the modeling decisions, format design, and sheet layout regular knowledge workers need to toil through to build a workbook from scratch. We introduce MBABench-2.0, a benchmark of 101 original spreadsheet construction tasks, the hardest of which is estimated to take 33 hours for a modeler with 3+ years of experience. Unlike coding or math, where a unit test or a final answer can verify an agent's output, the quality of a financial spreadsheet that concerns readability, maintainability, or auditability, is not so simply verifiable. To holistically evaluate spreadsheet construction, we introduce 129 criteria spanning 12 categories that operationalize quality beyond the accuracy of the spreadsheet. Evaluating over 20 agents across 8 models and 4 harness types, we find that frontier agents rarely construct spreadsheets that are both accurate and meet our quality criteria: the top agent achieves a pass rate of only 16% on the benchmark. The benchmark demonstrates a substantial gap in spreadsheet building capability of current agents.