WorkstreamBench: Evaluating LLM Agents on End-to-End Spreadsheet Tasks in Finance

TL;DR

This paper introduces WorkstreamBench, a benchmark for evaluating LLM agents on complex, end-to-end spreadsheet tasks in finance, highlighting current limitations in producing professional-quality outputs.

Contribution

It presents one of the first comprehensive evaluations of LLM agents on real-world financial spreadsheet workflows, with a new multidimensional assessment taxonomy.

Findings

Claude family agents produce the most professional-looking spreadsheets

Agents often fall short of professional finance standards

Performance degrades sharply with increased complexity

Abstract

LLM agents are increasingly expected to carry out end-to-end workflows, producing complete artifacts from high-level user instructions. To meet enterprise needs, frontier AI labs have developed agents that can construct entire spreadsheets from scratch. This is especially relevant in finance, where core workflows such as financial modeling, forecasting, and scenario analysis are commonly conducted through spreadsheets. Yet, existing spreadsheet benchmarks do not measure this advanced capability, focusing instead on question-answering or single-formula edits. To address this gap, we provide one of the first evaluations of agents on end-to-end spreadsheet tasks, focusing on economically critical financial workflows such as modeling and scenario analysis. Since deliverables therein are routinely reviewed and revised by multiple stakeholders, judging their quality necessarily involves high-level criteria such as readability or ease of modification. To reflect the multidimensional nature of solution quality, we develop an evaluation taxonomy comprising three dimensions: Accuracy, Formula, and Format, each comprising fine-grained criteria that reflect professional standards. The Claude family leads the benchmark and produces the most professional-looking outputs in our qualitative review, but even the strongest agents frequently fall short of professional finance standards and degrade sharply as the difficulty increases beyond a few chained calculations. This suggests that current agents are not yet able to reliably produce professional-quality spreadsheets at the level of complexity real-world workflows demand.