BizCompass: Benchmarking the Reasoning Capabilities of LLMs in Business Knowledge and Applications

TL;DR

BizCompass is a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs' reasoning and knowledge in core business domains and roles, linking theoretical capabilities with practical applications.

Contribution

It introduces a dual-axis benchmark covering business knowledge and roles, systematically evaluating LLMs and providing insights for real-world business use.

Findings

Reveals performance gaps in LLMs across business scenarios

Diagnoses foundational capabilities affecting practical success

Provides actionable insights for model selection and training

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) hold great promise for business applications, yet business analysis remains inherently complex, demanding rigorous reasoning and the integration of diverse knowledge sources. Existing benchmarks typically target narrow tasks and thus leave a fundamental question unanswered: how can LLMs be reliably applied in business, and how are these applications grounded in underlying theoretical capabilities? To address this gap, we introduce BizCompass, a benchmark explicitly designed to connect theoretical foundations with practical business knowledge and applications. At the knowledge level, BizCompass covers four core domains--finance, economics, statistics, and operations management. At the application level, it structures tasks around three representative roles: the analyst, the trader, and the consultant. This dual-axis design not only exposes performance differences across realistic scenarios but also diagnoses which foundational capabilities enable or constrain success. We systematically evaluate both open-source and commercial LLMs, revealing how theoretical knowledge translates into practical performance in business. The results provide actionable insights for model selection and training optimization in real-world business contexts. All datasets and evaluation code are publicly released to support reproducibility and future research: https://bizcompass.dev.ypemc.com.