Firmendaten: Parsed balance sheets for every Austrian company

About

Ever since January 2025 the Austrian Ministry of Justice has made the Firmenbuch public (and free!) as part of the EUs Open Data Directive. Firmendaten builds on that: we ingest the filings, extract the balance sheet figures (which, luckily, mostly come as an XML), and make them searchable and comparable across companies and years. When we set out to do it, it sounded pretty easy: extract the XML, save them in a table, calculate the KPIs and build the from-tend. However, a few things made it harder than expected. - Fiscal years don't line up. We compare the latest year both companies filed for. If there is none, each column shows its own latest year and is labelled as such. We also only match on the year, so a balance sheet dated 31 March and one dated 31 December both count as "2024". There's quite some (internal) discussion on how to handle that. - Small companies don't have to disclose revenue. Small GmbHs/FlexCos file an abridged balance sheet without a P&L, so margins simply aren't available for a large share of companies. Our "growth" figure falls back to total assets, which is a weak signal: it also grows when a company takes on debt. On a more general note: not every financial figure makes equal sense for every industry / company. Ideally, we would have specific numbers, based on the industry. - Holding companies break ratios. They book dividends from subsidiaries as income on almost no revenue, which gives you profit margins above 100%. That's actually just one part of the issue around holding companies, and subsidies. - Generated summaries overclaim easily. "Company A is more stably financed" really just means "higher equity ratio". We're still tuning the wording, which is one reason the page is labelled beta. None of the summaries are AI-generated, as that requires quite some tweaking to get right (agin, a lot of the interpretation depends on the industry/company).

Discovery history

1. Show HN

   Oct 19, 2026 · 1 observations