The Czech Republic is one of the more transparent jurisdictions in Europe for company data — if you know where to look and how to read what you find. Three public sources matter for an investor, and each has its own failure modes.
The three registries that matter
- ARES (ares.gov.cz) — the state's master register: legal name, IČO (company ID), DIČ (tax ID), registered address, legal form, NACE activity codes. Machine-readable, reliable, free. The starting point for any lookup.
- Obchodní rejstřík + Sbírka listin (or.justice.cz) — the commercial registry and its document collection: articles, registered capital, statutory bodies, and crucially the filed financial statements (účetní závěrky) and annual reports, going back years. This is where the numbers live.
- Evidence skutečných majitelů — the register of ultimate beneficial owners: who actually stands behind the entity, through however many holding layers. Essential for KYC and for understanding who you would really be negotiating with.
The pitfalls nobody warns you about
- Filings are late or missing. The filing obligation is real; enforcement is imperfect. A company with no statements filed for three years is itself a due-diligence signal.
- The statements are PDFs, and often scanned images — a photographed paper document, not a data file. Extracting numbers means OCR plus judgement, not copy-paste.
- Czech number formats bite: decimal commas (24,45 means 24.45), and figures reported 'v tisících Kč' (in CZK thousands). Mixing a thousands-scale figure with an absolute one shifts a number by three orders of magnitude — this is the single most common extraction error, common enough that Misano's engine carries an explicit guard against the margins it produces.
- Small entities may file abridged statements — often a balance sheet without a full P&L. You can still infer a lot (equity movement, debt structure), but EBITDA may need to come from the seller.
- Consolidated versus standalone: a holding files consolidated numbers, its operating subsidiary files its own. Valuing the wrong entity's statements is a classic.
Manual workflow vs. automated
Manually: look up the IČO in ARES, open the company at or.justice.cz, download the last three years of statements from Sbírka listin, OCR or retype the key lines, normalize units, look up the UBO register separately. Half a day per company if the filings are clean; more if they're scans.
Automated (this is what Misano does natively for Czech companies): paste the IČO — identity arrives from ARES, three years of statements are pulled from Sbírka listin and parsed by AI including scanned documents, beneficial owners come from the UBO data, and the NACE code links the company to its valuation benchmark. Seconds instead of an afternoon, with unit-scale and decimal-comma guards built into the extraction.