Montier C-Score

Calculate James Montier’s C-Score, a count from 0 to 6 of warning signs that a company is “cooking the books”. Each sign is 1 when present:

• A growing gap between net income and cash flow from operations.
• Rising days sales outstanding: receivables growing faster than sales.
• Rising days sales of inventory: inventory growing faster than cost of sales.
• Rising other current assets relative to revenue, a place to park costs.
• Falling depreciation relative to gross property, plant and equipment, which flatters earnings.
• Total asset growth above 10%, typical of serial acquirers.

Montier found that companies scoring 5 or 6 underperformed the market markedly.

For more information, see the following paper:

• Montier, J. (2008). “Cooking the Books, or, More Sailing Under the Black Flag.” Société Générale, Mind Matters.

Also known as: C-Score, cooking the books score.

Montier C-Score in Python or via the MCP

Install the Finance Toolkit with:

pip install financetoolkit -U

Then call get_montier_c_score as shown below.

from financetoolkit import Toolkit

toolkit = Toolkit(
    ["AAPL", "MSFT", "SMCI"],
    api_key="FINANCIAL_MODELING_PREP_KEY",
    start_date="2021-01-01",
    end_date="2025-12-31",
)

toolkit.models.get_montier_c_score().xs("C-Score", level=1)

Or, after setting up the Finance Toolkit MCP, ask:

Which returns:

Parameters

get_montier_c_score accepts the following parameters.

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