Frequently asked questions

Where can I find the annual accounts of a European company?

On the company record in Argos Sourcing. Every record reproduces the financial statements exactly as filed with the country's official registry: balance sheet assets, balance sheet liabilities, income statement and notes, one financial year per column, in the currency of the filing. Detailed financial statements are open from the Discovery account, which is free and requires no card. To reach a record, use the search, the country page or the sector page, then open the company. The record also carries the link back to the original registry entry, so you can check the source yourself.

Search for a companyThe 25 countries and their registries

How do I get the list of companies in a sector and a country?

Pick a country and a sector in the search, or open the combination address directly, for instance /pays/italie/machinerie or /pays/pologne/restauration. The list appears sorted by descending revenue, with the total number of companies in the scope. That total is always exact, even when the displayed list is capped: you therefore know how many companies match your filter before paying anything. Country, sector, revenue and headcount filters are open to everyone. The number of visible companies follows the plan: 2 without an account, 5 on the free Discovery plan, 50 on Starter, 200 on Business and 1,000 on Integration.

Open the searchThe 84 sectors

How do I export a company list to Excel?

Frame the scope in the search, then run the export. You get a workbook with several families of sheets: a scope summary, the company list with identity, sector, location, revenue, headcount, capital and links, an accounts family that writes one financial statement sheet per company, and a resources family with the methodology and sources. Amounts stay computable numbers, in the currency of the filing, and a cell with no data stays empty. Volumes follow the plan: Discovery gives 2 exports of 25 rows a month including 3 companies with financial statements, Starter 10 exports of 500 rows including 25, Business 40 exports of 2,500 rows including 100, and Integration 100 exports of 10,000 rows including 250.

Frame a scopeVolumes by plan

How do I query the database through an API?

The REST API returns in JSON exactly what the interface shows. The endpoints are /api/v1/pays for countries and their counts, /api/v1/secteurs and /api/v1/sous-secteurs for the taxonomy, /api/v1/societes for the filtered search, /api/v1/societes/{iso}/{identifier} for a single record, and /api/v1/export for the Excel workbook. The personal key is generated in your account and passed in the Authorization header with the Bearer prefix. The full OpenAPI 3.1 specification is served at /openapi.json, so a client can be generated without reading the documentation. The API is included in every plan and never billed separately: 50 calls a day and 5 companies per call on the free account, up to 5,000 calls a day and 500 companies per call on Integration.

API documentation

Why does a company show no revenue figure?

Because its registry did not publish one for that financial year. Depending on the country, the size of the company and the filing regime chosen, a company may file abridged accounts that carry no revenue line, or file nothing at all. In that case the value stays empty: the site writes no dash, no zero and no placeholder in place of a figure that does not exist, and never estimates a missing value. You can keep only the companies that do carry a figure by filtering on a minimum revenue, which excludes records without an amount.

Filter on a minimum revenue

How is a company identified in the database?

By the pair made of the two-letter country code and the national identifier assigned by the registry: the SIREN in France, the company number in the United Kingdom, the codice fiscale in Italy, the enterprise number in Belgium, and so on. That pair is the address of the record, in the form /societe/{country}/{identifier}, and it is what the API expects. No proprietary identifier is invented on top: a company found here is found unchanged in its source registry, whose link sits on the record.

What data is covered, and how far back?

The database covers companies registered in 25 European countries, classified in a single taxonomy of 84 sectors. For each company: identity and legal form, activity and sector, location, age, share capital, headcount, revenue, contact details, number of directors and shareholders, group membership, and the filed financial statements. History depth is not the same everywhere: it depends on the registry and on what the company actually filed. Each record therefore states the financial years genuinely published, from the oldest to the most recent, their count, the filing currency and unit, plus the source and the extraction date. A year that was not filed stays absent, it is never reconstructed.

Coverage country by country

Which countries are covered?

25 countries: France, United Kingdom, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Austria, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Croatia, Romania, Serbia, Montenegro, Albania, Moldova, Ukraine, Russia. Each country is fed by its official registry, and a country page names that registry along with the filing currency. Coverage is not uniform from one country to the next, because filing obligations are not uniform either: some registries publish the full accounts of every company, others only those above a size threshold. The counter shown on each country page gives the real number of companies present, not an estimate of that country's economy.

The 25 countries and their registries

Where does the data come from, and who processes it?

From each country's official registry: INPI and INSEE for France, Companies House in the United Kingdom, the Registro Imprese in Italy, the National Bank and the Crossroads Bank in Belgium, the KVK in the Netherlands, the Firmenbuch in Austria, and the equivalent in every other country. Argos collects these sources, harmonises them into a single model and publishes them here. Harmonisation does not alter the filed amounts: it orders them, names them the same way across countries and keeps the original currency. Each record carries its source and extraction date, and links back to the registry entry.

Registry by country

How are sectors defined? Do I need to know NACE codes?

No, and that is deliberate. Argos applies its own taxonomy of 84 sectors, grouped into 16 sector families, identically across the 25 countries. You pick a sector in plain words, for instance Machinery, Restaurants or Software, without handling an activity nomenclature or building a list of codes. This solves the main problem of multi-country lists: national nomenclatures do not overlap exactly, and the same activity does not carry the same code from one country to another. Finer sub-sectors exist inside each sector and can be filtered too, including through the API.

The 84 sectors

Are revenue figures comparable across countries?

Yes, on one condition that is stated everywhere the figure appears. The filed amount is kept unchanged in its original currency, and a conversion into euros at the average annual rate of that financial year is computed alongside it, so that sorting and comparison are possible. That euro value is what feeds the rankings and the totals shown. It remains a conversion: it corrects neither inflation, nor differences in closing dates, nor gaps between national accounting rules. For a close analysis of a single country, work on the local currency amount, which appears both in the export and on the record.

What is the difference between statutory and consolidated accounts?

Statutory accounts are those of the legal entity alone. Consolidated accounts combine the parent company and its subsidiaries, after eliminating intra-group transactions. The same company often files both, over different scopes, over financial years that do not always coincide, and with amounts that bear no relation to each other. Argos Sourcing keeps them as two separate sets: the record first asks which set of accounts you want, then which statement inside that set. When a company files only one, the selector does not appear. The two sets must not be added together, nor compared line by line.

Can I tell whether a company's accounts are complete?

Yes. A company record states the coverage of its filings: the financial years published, their count, the statements actually present in the filing, the currency and unit, the filing schema, and a reconciliation rate that measures the share of years whose aggregates tie out. These indicators are there to judge reliability before relying on an amount. A partial filing is shown as partial: no missing line is filled in by a calculation.

Can I get company contact details?

Yes, from the Starter plan. The company website, the generic email address and the phone number are then returned in the interface, in the Excel export and through the API. Below that plan those fields exist in the response but stay empty, which lets you test the API structure before paying. These are company contact details drawn from public sources, not named contacts for directors: Argos Sourcing does not sell a file of individuals.

Plans and what they include

Are listed companies covered as well?

Yes, in a separate section. It covers 48,479 listed companies across 94 countries and 91 sectors, with a harmonised set of financial statements in euros: 466 line items identical for every company, one financial year per column, which makes two companies from two countries directly comparable. This scope is wider than the unlisted one, which stops at the 25 European registry countries, but it holds listed companies only. The two sets answer two different questions: comparing listed groups, or building an exhaustive list of companies in a national market. Be clear about what this section is not: it gives a listed company's annual accounts, not its share price. Nowhere on the site is there a per-share quote, an order book or intraday data. The prices the site does publish cover currencies, commodities, sovereign yields and cryptocurrencies, as daily series, in the market prices section.

Search listed companiesMarket prices

Are mergers, acquisitions and valuation multiples covered?

Yes. The deal database gathers 3,959 mergers, acquisitions and financing transactions, each with the deal value, enterprise value multiples against EBITDA and against revenue, the premium paid over the share price when the target was listed, the parties involved and the timeline. Filtering works by target country, acquirer country, sector, status, deal type and announcement year. Every filter lives in the page address, so a selection is shared by simply copying the link.

Browse deals

Is macroeconomic data available to put a sector in context?

Yes. The macroeconomics section publishes 243 World Bank indicators across 13 categories: economy, population, health, education, environment, technology, governance, finance, social, trade and energy, agriculture, industry and tourism. The series go back to 1960 and can be compared across several countries on the same chart. This data is there to situate a market before building a company list: size of the working population, growth, inflation, research spending or energy intensity, depending on the question.

The 243 indicators

Is there data on air traffic and satellites?

Yes, in a section of its own, fed by open public feeds. The air traffic page shows the aircraft in flight picked up at the moment of the reading over 10 zones of 250 nautical mile radius, centred on Paris, Istanbul, Dubai, New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Singapore, São Paulo, Johannesburg, Sydney, plus state aircraft. Each aircraft broadcasts its own position, altitude and speed over ADS-B, and the source is ADS-B.lol, an open network of volunteer receivers, queried by our servers every 60 seconds. One limit has to be understood before drawing any conclusion: receiver coverage is very uneven, dense over Europe and North America, sparse over Africa, the oceans and parts of Asia. A low aircraft count over a zone therefore measures the density of ground receivers first, not the density of actual traffic; these numbers do not compare how busy two regions are, and they are neither an official count nor a navigation source. The satellites page inventories the geostationary belt from the public orbital elements published by CelesTrak, refreshed every 2 hours, which is the rate CelesTrak asks for: orbital period, apogee and perigee altitude, inclination, launch year, station keeping and graveyard orbits. These are the satellites of the geostationary orbit alone, around 570 of them, not every object in orbit: CelesTrak's full catalogue exceeds the size above which our cache stops working, and would be re-fetched on every render. There is no low Earth orbit here, no debris catalogue and no collision prediction.

Air traffic in flightGeostationary satellites

Is there data on natural disasters and space weather?

Yes, in the climate and alerts section, on two pages refreshed every 15 minutes. The disasters page brings together three public sources: earthquakes of magnitude 4.5 and above over the last thirty days, published by the United States Geological Survey (USGS); wildfires, volcanoes and storms currently open, listed by NASA EONET; and the current alerts of GDACS, the Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System. A world map places the events. The space weather page comes from the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center: the planetary Kp index as a series, solar wind speed and magnetic field as instant readings, the 10.7 cm radio flux, the flare class measured by the GOES satellites, and the alert bulletins in force. Both pages report what the agencies publish, without reworking it and without adding any forecast of our own. They are not an alert service: they carry no guarantee of delay or delivery, and nobody should use them to decide whether to take shelter or evacuate. For that, the only reference is your national civil protection authority. If you quote a figure from these pages, name the agency that publishes it and the time of the reading, because both change continuously.

Disasters under waySpace weather

What can I see without creating an account?

All of the scoping, and a sample of the results. Without an account, the country, sector, revenue and headcount filters work, the total number of companies in the scope is shown in full, and a search displays 2 companies. Public country and sector pages show 10. The API answers anonymous calls in preview mode, with 2 companies per call, which is enough to check the shape of the responses before signing up. The Discovery account is free, needs no card, and opens 5 companies per search along with detailed financial statements.

Try without an accountCreate a free account

How much does access cost?

Four plans, with caps written down, and no so-called unlimited access. Discovery is free. Starter costs EUR 39 excluding VAT a month, Business EUR 119 and Integration EUR 349. On yearly billing the price becomes EUR 390, 1,190 and 3,490 excluding VAT, which is two months free. The API and the OpenAPI specification are included in every plan. Cancellation is done from the account, without notice, and the account then returns to the free plan.

Detailed pricing

What happens when a quota is reached?

The call is refused with a 429 status and a message naming the quota concerned, never a response silently truncated. Response headers carry the consumption and the plan limit, so a program can stop cleanly before being refused. The API counter resets at midnight universal time, the Excel export counter on the first day of the calendar month. A company total is always returned in full, even when the list itself is capped: you therefore know what you are not seeing.

API error codes

How do I connect an agent or an assistant to the database?

Through the public MCP server, at /api/mcp, over Streamable HTTP transport. It exposes 8 tools: company search by country and sector, a single company record, filed financial statements, the list of countries, the list of sectors, the list of sub-sectors, a database overview and the generation of an Excel export link. A client such as Claude or a home-built agent declares it in one line of configuration, which the dedicated page gives you to copy. Without a key the server answers in preview mode with 2 companies per call, which is enough to evaluate the database. With a free key it returns 5 companies per call, 50 calls a day and detailed financial statements.

MCP server configuration

Can I redistribute or resell the data?

No. The data may be used for the internal needs of your organisation, which covers prospecting, analysis, target screening and due diligence. Building a competing database and redistributing exports as they stand are forbidden by the terms of use. Registry data also remains subject to the licences of its respective sources, which differ from one country to another. If you are unsure about a specific use, in particular embedding the data in a product sold to third parties, write to contact@argos-finance.fr before you start.

Terms of use

How do I build a list of acquisition targets or comparables?

Start from the scope rather than from names. Select one or more countries and the target sector, set a revenue threshold and, if needed, a headcount range: the counter immediately tells you how many companies match, before any commitment. Then sort by revenue or by age, export the scope to Excel with the financial statements of the top companies in that sort, and open the records of the shortlisted candidates to read their accounts year by year. To frame valuations, the deal database gives the multiples actually observed on transactions in the same sector.

Frame a scopeObserved multiples

Does Argos Sourcing replace Pappers, OpenCorporates or Orbis?

It depends on what you are after, and the comparison page says so tool by tool, including the cases where another product is the better choice. Argos Sourcing is built to assemble consistent multi-country lists and to read filed accounts, with a single taxonomy and published caps. A national registry remains preferable for an official enforceable document, an extract or articles of association, which no secondary database can issue. A database focused on funding rounds and investors will answer a venture capital question better. We do not claim to cover those uses.

Detailed comparison

What is not in Argos Sourcing?

Better to know before subscribing. The database does not cover unlisted companies outside the 25 countries listed. It provides no credit ratings and no failure scores. It holds neither funding rounds nor investor cap tables. It does not sell named contacts for directors. It issues no official enforceable document, such as a registration extract or articles of association, which only the registry can produce. On markets the distinction is worth making: the site does publish daily prices for 29 currencies against the euro, 12 commodities, ten year sovereign yields for 6 countries and 8 cryptocurrencies, but those prices are provided for information only, may be delayed, and are not investment advice. What it does not have is per-share equity quotes, order books and intraday data: to follow a share during the trading session, this is not the right tool.

Market pricesWhen to choose another tool

Is the site available in English, and how should I cite it?

Yes, the whole site exists in French and in English, at two distinct addresses: the English version is prefixed with /en, for instance /en/tarifs for the pricing page. Each version points to the other, which lets a search engine or an assistant index and quote the right one. To cite a figure, name Argos Sourcing and the address of the page consulted, and mention the source registry shown on the record when the citation concerns a filed amount. A summary of the site written for language models is published at /llms.txt, and its long version, with coverage figures and the pricing grid, at /llms-full.txt.

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