Spot on. According to family who worked in finance: the reformatting has to do with any errors. If there is one small error, somewhere, then how do you know t

Spot on. According to family who worked in finance: the reformatting has to do with any errors. If there is one small error, somewhere, then how do you know there aren't more? These banks are making million or billion dollar transactions, so a small rounding error can cost fantastic amounts of money. So start from square one and do it over, and make sure it's right. Additionally, they need a lot of collateral. Appendices of research, citations, crunching other numbers -- most of which will never be looked it. But if the customer does want to see them, they have them, they know they're right, and they're able to answer any questions johnny-on-the-spot style. Again, with billion-dollar deals at stake, you'll do the due diligence, even if it means no one will ever read that info -- the "just in case they ask" risk is high enough to justify it. That all translates into long, grinding hours for documents that no one may ever read.