Field report 7 · Data sources and registers
Making public registers machine-readable: annual accounts as data
How published annual accounts of German companies become comparable figures that can be analysed reliably.
- Status
- Built Built and proven in our own use.
- Published
- Publisher
- SIMO GmbH, Aschaffenburg, Germany
Starting questionHow do published annual accounts of German companies become comparable figures that can be analysed reliably?
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 normalised to the German commercial code (HGB) structure. On top come a plausibility check (assets equal 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.
Learnings
- Accounts from 2022 onwards 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 normalised data apart makes the analysis auditable.
- annual accounts
- company register
- data provenance
- HGB