IfA18 — Swiss exchange format for tenders and electrical schematics

What is IfA18?

L'IfA18 is a structured data exchange format dedicated to the building electrical trade in Switzerland. Its full name, Industrieformat für Anschluss 1.8, designates version 1.8 of a standard originally published by the IfA association (Informatique pour l'Artisanat), today maintained under the aegis of the SIA and actively supported by EIT.swiss and Electrosuisse.

In concrete terms, an IfA18 file carries three families of information that a Swiss electrical workflow handles every day:

• The tender items structured according to the chapters of the CAN catalogue (502 to 589), with quantities, unit prices, installation times and associated supplies.
• The schematics and material lists produced during design (single-line diagrams, layout plans, panel arrangement).
• The commercial metadata: site identification, project owner, revision index, delivery terms, VAT, early-payment discounts, payment method.

IfA18 comes in several file extensions: .crbx (modern ZIP container), .e1s and .e2s (flat text records), as well as .01s inherited from IfA92. All these variants share the same grammar and the same set of canonical fields. The format remains resolutely structured text: it is human-readable, parsable by any language, and operating-system independent. That is precisely what has made it a durable standard for more than thirty years in the Swiss and German-speaking electrical industry.

History and adoption

IfA was born in the early 1990s from an observation shared by engineering offices, installers and wholesalers: double entry of quotation items alone cost the equivalent of one full-time position in a medium-sized SME. The first public version, IfA92 (extension .01s), laid the textual foundations of the format. More than twenty-five years later, IfA18 was published to modernize the structure (explicit chapters, ZIP container, extended metadata) without breaking backward compatibility.

Adoption was driven by the convergence of several players: the SIA which references it in the documentation recommendations, EIT.swiss which makes it indispensable in tenders, and theUSIE which made it the backbone of the CAN catalogue. The main Swiss energy distributors — Romande Énergie, Sierre Énergie, SIG, BKW, EWB, IWB, EKZ — require or recommend IfA18 in their tendering and acceptance procedures. On the tooling side, IfA18 naturally coexists with the CRBX format (XML/text container) and the CAN catalogue: in practice, exporting a CRBX quotation amounts to producing a compliant IfA18.

Technical structure of the IfA18 format

The IfA18 format is a format record-based text (record-based) rather than free-form XML. Each line represents a typed record (article, chapter, condition, price…) identified by a code in first position and terminated by a carriage return. The files .crbx are just packaging: inside, you find files .e1s (main positions) and .e2s (extensions/annexes) following exactly the same grammar.

File header

Every IfA18 file starts with a record A0905 which acts as a header. It contains: format version, identifier of the emitting software, generation date and time, project identifier, main language (FR/DE/IT), currency (CHF by default), declared encoding and issuer information (company name, phone, software used). This header is mandatory: its absence or incompleteness leads to immediate rejection on import.

Functional sections

The body of the file is organized into coherent sections:

• Articles — each piece of equipment (luminaire, socket outlet, circuit breaker, cable) with its CAN code, multilingual designation, quantity and price.
• Pricing — hourly labour rates (fitter, foreman, apprentice), purchasing factors, margins, per-chapter conditions.
• Catalogues — referencing of the CAN chapters used (G511 socket outlets and luminaires, G522 distribution, G531 wiring…) and of the links to ELDAS for material supplies.
• Schematics — links to the associated single-line diagrams and drawings (embedded PDFs or external references).
• Commercial terms — early-payment discounts, rebates, VAT, payment method, offer validity.

CP850 encoding and 257-character limit

Two crucial technical particularities make IfA18 specific and explain most of the import errors encountered in the industry:

• CP850 encoding (Code Page 850, alias DOS Latin-1) — IfA18 is not in UTF-8. This is a legacy of the 1990s Windows DOS tools, never revisited for the sake of backward compatibility. In practice, French accents (é, à, ç, ô) must be encoded in CP850, otherwise they become unreadable in standard Swiss quoting software.
• Strict limit of 257 characters per line — any record exceeding 257 characters is rejected by the trade parsers (classic error 2016 on a CRBX import). Long labels must be split into several sub-records (flag=2 for chunk_1/chunk_2, flag=3 for overflow). An export that ignores this constraint produces a .crbx which opens on some machines and crashes on others — the trickiest diagnosis in the field.

Coexistence with .e1s, .e2s and .crbx

The container .crbx is a ZIP that typically aggregates a .e1s (main positions) and one or more .e2s (annexes: attachments, drawings, PDF files). Modern software reads all three extensions interchangeably. For transmission by e-mail, preference goes to the .crbx; for a direct import, some workflows accept the .e1s alone.

Main fields of the IfA18 file

The table below summarizes the fields most frequently handled in an IfA18 file. It is not the exhaustive list (the spec contains more than 200), but the structuring fields that an integrator or a developer systematically encounters.

Typical workflow — from DWG schematic to CRBX quote

The operational value of IfA18 becomes clear across the complete production chain of a Swiss electrical project file. Here is the canonical workflow on a new build of a single-family house or a medium-sized commercial building:

1. Design in AutoCAD with ElectroSchema — the design office draws the multi-page single-line diagrams with automatic cross-references between sheets, EN 81346 designations and symbols IEC 60617. Every inserted block natively carries its CAN code, its price and its ELDAS link where applicable.
2. Material list generation — the command EC_BOM aggregates all components with their quantities, taking into account the cables measured from the layout plans.
3. CRBX/IfA18 export — a generation module produces the file .crbx while respecting the CP850 encoding, the 257-character limit, the CAN chapter structure and the correct CI codes (11 supplied+installed, 12 supplied only, 13 installed only, 21 time and material, etc.).
4. Local validation with SIATEST — the official tool validates compliance before submission; objective zero errors, zero warnings.
5. Transfer to the standard Swiss quoting software of the installer or the utility (Romande Énergie, BKW, SIG…), which imports the file in about thirty seconds.
6. Utility validation and possible return as an enriched IfA18 (updated purchase prices, negotiated conditions, incremented revision index).
7. Archiving — the .crbx is kept as a contractual document in the same way as a signed PDF; each revision generates a new diffable file.

The net gain for a typical Swiss SME is around 4 to 6 hours per medium-sized quote, not counting the elimination of re-entry errors, which statistically represent 1 to 3 % of revenue in invisible losses.

SIATEST validation — pass with 0 errors

SIATEST is the official validation tool for IfA18/CRBX files in Switzerland. It takes as input a .crbx and returns a report listing structural errors, price inconsistencies and spec violations. Without a report 0 errors / 0 warnings, no serious distributor will accept the file in production.

The most frequent rejection reasons observed in the field:

• Magic_17 < 10 — the header must declare at least the 10 standard CAN chapters (G511, G522, G531, G543, G551, G574, G583, G584, G585, G599), even empty with flag=1. Without this declaration, SIATEST rejects the file with an obscure « data medium code is not 1 » message.
• Confusion between G599 and G511.141 — ELDAS supplies must be referenced in G511.141.NNN, not in G599 (reserved for special items and for the reserve). The special markers *** 1200 ***, the ELDAS number and the designation follow a strict chunk order (flag=3).
• Encoding outside CP850 — a file mistakenly exported as UTF-8 sometimes passes the import but corrupts accented characters and triggers SIATEST warnings.
• Lines > 257 characters — error 2016, labels not split into chunks.
• Incomplete A0905 header — company name, phone number or software identifier missing or non-compliant.

ElectroCAD builds these rules into its generator: the output .crbx passes SIATEST with zero errors from the first iteration on typical projects (single-family house, apartment building, open-plan office floor).

Differences: IfA18 vs alternatives

IfA18 is a format specifically Swiss and has no strict equivalent abroad. A comparative overview:

• France — no national equivalent. The French market runs on proprietary vendor formats (EBP, Codial, MultiDevis quotations) or makeshift Excel exports. No contractual interoperability requirement at national level.
• Germany — the format VDE (carried by the Verband der Elektrotechnik) plays a comparable role but remains less structured on pricing and has no equivalent of the CAN chapter structure. The format GAEB (construction industry in the broad sense) is used as a complement.
• Austria — gradual adoption of standards close to the German VDE, with no dedicated national electrical standard.
• Italy, Spain, Benelux — national practices without a standardized format.

The strength of tracking by EIT.swiss and the SIA lies in the fact that the same grammar covers the entire chain: quoting, ordering, delivery, invoicing and archiving. This is what makes it a unique case in Europe of an end-to-end interoperable trade ecosystem, and explains the standard's resilience against proprietary attempts.

FAQ

To go further

• SIA 451 — Documentation of electrical installations
• CAN 2026 catalogue — standardised CH articles
• OIBT — Ordinance on Low-Voltage Installations
• NIBT 2020 — Low-voltage installation standard
• ElectroSchema — AutoCAD single-line diagrams
• NIBT 2020 and Swiss diagrams — practical guide