---
title: "Annual accounts as data: making registers machine-readable"
description: "How published annual accounts of German companies become comparable figures that can be analyzed reliably."
canonical: "https://simosphereai.com/en/field-reports/annual-accounts-as-data"
lang: en
---

# Annual accounts as data: making registers machine-readable

How published annual accounts of German companies become comparable figures that can be analyzed reliably.

- Published: 2026-10-06
- Updated: 2026-10-06
- Status: gebaut
- Publisher: SIMO GmbH

## Starting question

How do published annual accounts of German companies become comparable figures that can be analyzed reliably?

## Result: works

The local mirror delivers comparable figures in the HGB structure, with a plausibility check and provenance for every document.

Through a local mirror: a company’s publications are copied once in full; after that, only new ones are synchronized. Every document exists twice, true to the original and normalized to the HGB structure, with a plausibility check and provenance. Accounts from 2022 on are in the Unternehmensregister.

## What we built

We built a server that mirrors all publications of a company into a local database once and from then on only reconciles what is new.

Every document exists twice: true to the original and normalized to the German commercial code (HGB) structure. On top come a plausibility check (total assets equal total equity and liabilities) and a provenance record with a hash.

## What it means for business architecture

External data only becomes an asset once its provenance, completeness, and coverage are proven. An answer must also say which data is missing.

## Lessons learned

- Accounts from 2022 on sit in the company register (Unternehmensregister), no longer in the Federal Gazette. Miss that boundary and you wrongly report “no data”.
- When a portal offers no stable addresses, a mirror is the only stable foundation.
- Keeping raw and normalized data apart makes the analysis auditable.

Rendered version: https://simosphereai.com/en/field-reports/annual-accounts-as-data