What a Swedish SIE File Gives You in Diligence
If you are running diligence on a Swedish target and the data request list starts with “please provide the trial balance in Excel”, you are making the engagement harder and slower than it needs to be. Ask for the SIE file instead.
What SIE actually is
SIE stands for Standard Import Export. It has been Sweden's de facto accounting data interchange standard since 1992, created by the SIE Group — a non-profit association of Swedish accounting software vendors and professional bodies. Because adoption across the Swedish software market is effectively universal, almost any target you look at can produce one.
It is a tagged text format rather than XML, which makes it compact and unusually stable to parse. The XML-based revision, SIE5, arrived in 2018 to improve international readability, but SIE4 remains what you will encounter most often in practice.
The four types, and the one that matters
SIE defines four file types. Types 1 to 3 carry year-end balances, period balances and object balances respectively — useful for orientation, useless for answering a buyer's questions.
Type 4 is the one to ask for. It contains full transactions and vouchers: a complete audit trail of every individual entry for the fiscal year. It is the format Swedish accountants themselves request when conducting audits, migrating systems, or doing forensic work.
Why it compresses the timeline
On a typical offshore diligence engagement, the first week disappears into reconstruction. Someone re-keys or re-maps whatever the seller managed to export, then reconciles it back to the reported numbers before any analysis begins.
With an SIE4 file, that phase largely disappears. From one ingestion you can derive:
- Monthly profit and loss, at account level
- Monthly balance sheet movements
- Account-level detail with full voucher support behind every line
- The complete audit trail needed to answer follow-up questions without a new data request
The practical effect is that the seller's controller is not tied up producing bespoke extracts, and more of the fee goes to analysis rather than data entry.
Where the accounting still needs judgement
Clean data does not remove the accounting questions. Swedish limited companies report under K2, K3 or IFRS, and the differences matter in diligence:
- Capitalised development costs. K3 permits capitalisation in consolidated accounts where criteria are met, but not in single-entity statements. K2 prohibits it entirely. On a software target this alone can move reported EBITDA materially.
- Goodwill. K3 requires amortisation, unlike IFRS where goodwill is impairment-tested. An IFRS-basis buyer will normally add that charge back.
- Leases. K3 treatment diverges from IFRS 16, so leases a buyer would capitalise sit off balance sheet — affecting both EBITDA and net debt.
- Presentation. K3 allows cost-by-function or cost-by-nature; K2 permits only one. Comparing two Swedish targets often requires restating one first.
The practical request list
For a Swedish target, the opening data request can be short:
- SIE4 export covering the diligence period, per legal entity
- Filed årsredovisning for each year in scope
- Confirmation of reporting basis — K2, K3 or IFRS
- Chart of accounts mapping, if the group uses a custom structure
Everything else usually follows from those four items.
Where we come in
We read SIE4 and SIE5 natively, bridge K2 and K3 figures onto whatever basis the buyer is underwriting, and reconcile the statutory årsredovisning back to management reporting as a standard early step. If you are looking at a Swedish deal, send the export.
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