How to read Israeli company filings on Maya

Last updated: August 31, 2026

Israeli listed companies publish their reports on Maya, the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange's disclosure portal. A periodic report is not one file. It arrives as a set of PDFs, one per chapter, and the notes to the financial statements sit at the back of the financial statements chapter under headings that begin with the word ביאור.

This guide is written for someone who reads 10-Ks comfortably and is opening an Israeli filing for the first time. The accounting will be familiar, since Israeli listed companies report under IFRS. The document will not be.

What is Maya?

Maya is the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange's disclosure portal, at maya.tase.co.il. Every Israeli listed company files its periodic and immediate reports there, and the documents themselves are served from mayafiles.tase.co.il. It is the Israeli equivalent of EDGAR in function, though not in format: Maya distributes PDFs rather than filing-specific HTML.

That single difference drives most of what follows. On EDGAR you get a document your browser can search, select and link into. On Maya you get a print artifact. Some of them carry a text layer and some are closer to pictures of pages.

Why does one Israeli report arrive as several PDFs?

A periodic report is one submission split across chapters, and Maya publishes each chapter as its own PDF. A bank's annual filing routinely carries the financial statements, the directors' report, a risk report and an actuarial opinion as four separate documents. A cross-reference in one chapter frequently points at a note in another.

In the corpus of 37 Israeli filings we use to test SeeNote, the chapter titles that recur are דוחות כספיים (financial statements), דוח על הסיכונים (report on risks), חוות דעת אקטוארית (actuarial opinion) and דוח תקופתי (periodic report). Banks and insurers file the most chapters. A retailer might file two.

The practical consequence is that downloading "the annual report" and getting one file usually means you have a fragment. If a sentence in the directors' report sends you to ביאור 22, that note is in a different PDF than the one you are reading.

What is a ביאור?

A ביאור (bi'ur) is a note to the financial statements, the Hebrew equivalent of a 10-K footnote. It is also spelled באור, and both spellings appear in filings by the same company. The plural is ביאורים. Notes carry numbers and usually titles, so a typical heading reads ביאור 14 - מסים על הכנסה, meaning Note 14, Income Taxes.

The two spellings are not a typo. Hebrew writes vowels optionally, and both the fuller בי and the shorter ב form are in current use. If you are searching a PDF by text, you have to search for both or you will miss a third of the notes.

How do Hebrew filings write a note reference?

Most often as the noun plus a number plus a title: ביאור 14 - מסים על הכנסה. References also appear with a lead-in such as ראה, לפרטים נוספים, כמפורט or כאמור, and with grammatical prefixes fused to the noun, as in בביאור for in note and לביאור for to note. Lists like ביאורים 29 ו-30 are common.

Reading the reference vocabulary is worth a few minutes because it makes the filing scannable:

One quirk is worth knowing. Across our corpus the bare parenthetical form, a naked (ביאור 8) with nothing in front of it, does not occur. Hebrew filings put a lead-in in front: (ראה ביאור 8). English filings do the opposite and use the bare parenthetical constantly. If you are used to skimming for parentheses, that habit will not transfer.

What is the difference between a ביאור and a סעיף?

A ביאור is a note to the financial statements. A סעיף is a numbered section of a report chapter, such as the directors' report or the business description, and its numbering is usually hierarchical, like סעיף 8.1.3. The two are separate numbering systems, so section 8 and note 8 are unrelated documents.

This trips people up more than anything else in an Israeli filing, because both words are commonly translated as "section" or "note" depending on who is doing the translating. They are not interchangeable. Following a סעיף reference into the notes will land you somewhere plausible and wrong, which is worse than landing nowhere.

They also occur at comparable volume, which is the reason the distinction matters so much in practice. Measured across 51 Israeli PDFs and 23 iXBRL documents in our own test corpus, there are roughly 6,800 סעיף occurrences against roughly 6,200 note references. Whichever kind you are looking at, the other kind is about as likely to be the next one you meet.

Why is a Hebrew filing harder to navigate than a 10-K?

Three reasons, and only one of them is the language.

The first is the format. A PDF has pages, not anchors. There is no "jump to Note 12" because there is nothing in the file that names Note 12 as a destination.

The second is the split across chapters, described above. Even a working search box only searches the file you have open.

The third is right-to-left text. A PDF stores glyphs in the order they were painted, not the order they are read. Copy a Hebrew line containing a number out of a PDF and there is a good chance the number arrives detached from its noun or the punctuation ends up on the wrong end of the sentence. This is not a bug in your PDF reader. It is what the file contains.

What about iXBRL filings on Maya?

Maya renders some filings as inline XBRL and serves them as web pages rather than PDFs. Those behave much more like an EDGAR filing: the text is real text, the browser can search it, and the notes are addressable. If a filing you need is available that way, prefer it.

Coverage is partial and you cannot assume a given report exists in that form. Treat it as a bonus rather than the route you plan around.

How to read a TASE annual report

1. Open the report page on Maya, not a single document link. The page lists every chapter of the submission.
2. Take every chapter. The financial statements alone will not answer references made from the directors' report.
3. Find where the notes begin in the financial statements chapter: the run of headings starting ביאור 1, running in sequence to the end.
4. Read Note 1 first. It states the basis of preparation and the significant accounting policies, which is what makes every later number mean something specific.
5. Follow references by number and title. Hebrew filings usually print the title beside the number, so you know where you are being sent before you go.
6. Keep the two numbering systems apart. A סעיף reference points into a report chapter. Section 8 and note 8 are different places.

Maya and EDGAR, side by side

Does SeeNote work on Maya filings?

Yes. SeeNote adds an Open in SeeNote button beside the documents on a Maya report page, and it opens that report's attachments together so a reference in one chapter can resolve into another. Filings Maya has already rendered as iXBRL are read in place. The note appears exactly as filed, because it is the filed page.

Opening the chapters together is the part that matters. It is what lets a reference in the directors' report resolve into the financial statements. Doing that by hand means finding the right attachment, opening it, and finding your place again afterwards, for every reference.

Where SeeNote cannot work out which note a reference means, it says so instead of opening the wrong one. See how it works for the permissions and the click path, or the product page for the rest. If you also read UK filings, the UK annual report guide covers the same ground for the FCA's archive.

Questions

← All guides