Methodology: how Overit reads Luxembourg annual accounts

The source, and its licence

STATEC's Centrale des Bilans publishes, quarterly, the annual accounts filed electronically through eCDF. The files carry a Creative Commons CC BY-SA 4.0 licence: reuse is permitted provided the source is credited and the result shared on the same terms. Overit redistributes no data obtained under another licence, and buys no register extract or paid access.

The current dataset covers 167,200 companies, 1,119,777 financial years and 1,660,557 statements. Every filing is written in French; the English and German labels on this site are translations of the Luxembourg standard chart of accounts, not labels as filed.

What a filing carries — and what it does not

A Centrale des Bilans deposit holds the RCS number, the registered name, the currency, the financial year and the amounts — nothing else about the entity. The registered address, the NACE-Lux activity code, the date of incorporation, the managers and the shareholders are held by the Trade and Companies Register, which is free to consult one entity at a time and publishes no reusable bulk extract.

The beneficial owners register has not been public since the Court of Justice of the European Union's judgment of 22 November 2022. That information is therefore absent from this site rather than copied without a right to reuse it — which is why an Overit Luxembourg profile carries no address, no sector and no directors, where a Slovak or Hungarian profile carries all three.

Every amount is read against the filing's official XSD schema, by item identifier. Never by tag order, by a row's position in a table, or by a guessed label.

Confidentiality: absent is not nil

The amended law of 19 December 2002 lets a filer mark the profit and loss account, or the balance sheet and the profit and loss account together, as confidential. A confidential statement is not published: the row is absent from the profile, and that absence does not mean zero.

In the published data, 51.7% of financial years carry a balance sheet only. 50,684 companies — 30.3% of the register — have never published a profit and loss account. Net turnover appears only on the full form of the profit and loss account, 7.6% of financial years: for the great majority of Luxembourg companies there is no public revenue figure at all.

We never reconstruct a value the source marks confidential, even where it could be derived from other amounts in the same filing.

The 2016 presentation change

Luxembourg changed the presentation of the profit and loss account from financial year 2016: the earlier form files a charge as a positive amount on the charges side, the current one as a negative. A table that took both as filed would make one row change sign halfway along its own history.

Charges are therefore shown as negative for every year. The amount as filed is not lost: it remains readable in the Centrale des Bilans files, and our database keeps the raw value alongside the normalized one.

Standalone and consolidated accounts

A company that files both standalone and consolidated accounts files two series of figures that do not compare: one describes the entity, the other the group. They are never merged into a single series. Each financial year shown names the type of statement it came from.

The currency of filing

Luxembourg law allows accounts to be kept in the currency of the business, and a great many holding structures do: 19,526 companies — 11.2% of the register — file in something other than the euro, mostly US dollars, pounds sterling and Swiss francs.

No amount is converted. Every profile names the currency of the filing, and size rankings cover only companies that file in euros — a ranking that mixed currencies would sort numbers, not companies.

Calculated indicators

Year-over-year changes, margins and ratios are calculated by Overit from the published annual accounts. They are neither official STATEC or register figures nor a credit rating, and they do not appear as such in the filings.

Revenue change and profit change: the percentage difference from the preceding financial year of the same statement type. Net margin: profit for the year over net turnover. Equity to total assets and debts to total assets: share of the balance sheet, as a percentage. An indicator whose inputs include a confidential figure is not shown.

How complete a profile is

Completeness states how much of the public record we hold for a company: how many financial years were filed, whether a profit and loss account is among them, whether the history is continuous. It describes our data, not the company — a young company with one filing is not risky for having one, and a company exercising its right to confidentiality is no more so.

It is not a credit rating. We hold no payment history, no court records and no bank data. Every signal shown on a profile names the year and the figure it came from, so it can be checked against the source.

What we do not publish

No beneficial owners, no personal identifiers, no private addresses. We do not merge people who share a name into one profile: an identical name is not an identical person, and the Luxembourg source carries no identifier that would settle it.

We work around no technical access control to obtain data, and we buy no register access to feed this site.

Correcting a figure

The amounts shown reproduce the filing as published. If a figure is wrong at the source, the correction is made by filing an amended account with the Trade and Companies Register; it will appear here at the next quarterly publication.

If the error is in our reading — an item mapped to the wrong row, a currency carried over wrongly, a missing financial year — write to office@verdeholding.hu with the RCS number and the financial year concerned.