What is the Central Balance Sheet Data Office?
The Banco de España's Central Balance Sheet Data Office (CBSO) is part of the Department of Statistics and CBSO, one of the three departments comprising the Directorate General Economics, Statistics and Research.
The main task of the Central Balance Sheet Data Office is to
collect and store economic and financial information on the activities
of Spanish non-financial corporations in order to obtain a better
understanding of this sub-sector within the functions assigned
to the Banco de España under its Law
of Autonomy 
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Accordingly, since 1984, the Central Balance Sheet Data Office has been collecting economic and financial information from Spanish non-financial corporations, which co-operate on a voluntary basis by completing a standardised questionnaire.
The main objectives of the Central Balance Sheet Data Office include:
- Obtaining advance information from the Central Balance Sheet Data Office quarterly survey (CBQ), against which the short-term economic analysis carried out by the Research Department is checked.
- Obtaining information on the financial transactions, assets and liabilities of the non-financial corporations sub-sector. These data are required for the preparation of the Financial accounts of the Spanish economy by the Statistics and Central Balance Sheet Data Office Department.
- Keeping databases with exhaustive and homogeneous information on individual corporations, which is used by the Directorate General: Economics, Statistics and Research to analyse corporate behaviour and the effects of monetary policy measures on corporate finance and results. These databases are also one of the most important sources of information used by the Internal Credit Assessment System of the Banco de España within the Eurosystem Credit Assessment Framework. The purpose of the latter is to assess the credit quality of those corporations whose liabilities may, when they fulfil the eligibility requirements laid down by the Eurosystem, be provided by credit institutions as collateral in liquidity-providing and intraday credit operations with the Banco de España.
- Distributing to reporting corporations aggregate and homogeneous sectoral information in consideration of their co-operation.
- Disseminating aggregate sectoral information for use by other analysts outside the Banco de España: financial institutions, universities, researchers, central government, regional governments and domestic and international public bodies.