reply
by a searcher
1mo ago
from New York University
in San Diego, CA, USA
Claude + ClickUp + Google Workspace
Just prompted Claude for this regarding public Spanish databases.⤵️
Paid
1. SABI (Sistema de Análisis de Balances Ibéricos)
The standard for Spanish SME financials. Developed by Informa D&B in collaboration with Bureau van Dijk, it contains company accounts, ratios, activities, ownership and management for over a million Spanish and 320,000 Portuguese companies. Bureau van Dijk's country product for Spain and Portugal covers over 6.5 million companies. Excellent for peer benchmarking, screening by size/sector, and building target lists. Most Spanish universities and serious M&A shops subscribe. Worth noting: academic research has flagged that SABI is a non-random subset of the Spanish business population, and users should exercise caution — small firms and underperformers are more likely to be underrepresented.
2. Orbis (Moody's / Bureau van Dijk)
The global superset of SABI. With information on more than 625 million companies globally, Orbis captures and blends data from more than 170 different sources, standardized for comparability. Useful if you want cross-border comparables or if you're screening Spanish targets alongside their European peers.
3. Informa D&B
The largest Spanish business database, drawing from the Borme (Official Gazette of the Mercantile Register), Official Filed Accounts, BOE, and Provincial/autonomous region official gazettes. They offer strategic reports including strengths/weaknesses, financial analysis, RAI, ASNEF defaults, payment experiences, and sectorial risk data. Strong on payment behavior / credit risk, which is hard to get from registry-only sources.
4. Axesor
Competitor to Informa, similar commercial reports, decent coverage of sole proprietors.
5. Dato Capital
Provides extended reports with annual accounts, including financial statements, profit and loss, share distribution of founding partners, and real estate properties owned by the company. Lower-priced pay-per-report option — useful when you need one-off detail without a subscription.
6. Infoempresa / e-informa
Pay-per-report tier, with free basic summaries for many companies.
Free/official government sources
1. Registro Mercantil (Central + provincial)
The Registro Mercantil Central is Spain's official trade register where all companies are obliged to register; fees for accessing documents are usually under €5 per consultation. The Central Mercantile Registry in Madrid handles name reservations and high-level data; full certificates and financial statements come only from the provincial registry where the company is domiciled. Annual accounts ("Depósito de Cuentas") are filed here — this is the primary source feeding most of the commercial databases above.
2. BORME (Boletín Oficial del Registro Mercantil)
Published daily, the BORME records every significant corporate event — new incorporations, director changes, capital increases, mergers, dissolutions, insolvency. The electronic edition has full legal authority and is free at boe.es/diario_borme/. Best real-time signal for deal flow and counterparty changes.
3. INE — DIRCE (Instituto Nacional de Estadística, Central Business Directory)
Spain's official indicator for active businesses — 3.25 million economically active enterprises as of 1 JanuaryredactedAggregated, not company-level, but the canonical source for market sizing by sector, region, and size class.
4. Ministerio de Industria y Turismo — SME statistics
Publishes the annual "Retrato de las PYME" (Portrait of SMEs), the monthly "Cifras PYME" report based on Social Security registrations, and the yearly "Estructura y Dinámica Empresarial en España." Good for macro-level SME context in pitches and LP decks.
5. CNMV (Comisión Nacional del Mercado de Valores)
The public body responsible for supervising Spanish securities markets; collects information on companies that issue or offer securities publicly. Relevant mainly for the small subset of SMEs that have tapped BME Growth or issued MARF debt.
6. Registro Público Concursal
Insolvency register — free lookups for active insolvency proceedings. Essential for distressed-deal screening and counterparty risk.
Free aggregators
1. Companysearch.es a nd Info-clipper - free lookup tools offering basic Spanish company data.
2. Infoempresa (free tier) — basic directors and company-summary data without paying.
European sources (free, aggregated)
1. BACH (Bank for the Accounts of Companies Harmonized) — ECCBSO
Contains harmonized annual accounts statistics of European non-financial enterprises, including Spain, with breakdowns by 4 size classes (Small, Medium, SMEs, Large) and by NACE sector. Free to access. Best free source for benchmarking aggregated SME financial ratios across Europe.
2. Eurostat — Structural Business Statistics
Sector-level SME counts, value added, employment, and productivity. Aggregated only, but free and authoritative.
3. Practical stack for buy-side GovCon / SME M&A work
If I were building a target-sourcing pipeline on Spanish SMEs from scratch, the realistic stack is: SABI as the core screening and benchmarking layer, Informa or Axesor reports for counterparty and credit-risk depth on shortlisted names, BORME as a free monitoring feed for director changes and insolvency signals, and the Registro Mercantil provincial offices for the definitive certified documents once you're at LOI stage. Everything else is supplementary.
One caveat worth internalizing: the Spanish SME data ecosystem has meaningful selection bias at the very small end — micro-firms (most of the 3.25M figure) file thin or late accounts, and SABI's coverage thins out commensurately. For sub-€2M revenue targets, expect to supplement database work with primary outreach and chamber-of-commerce sources.
