Balsa's compact representation requires some tradeoffs around expressiveness. Multi-atom bonding is not supported beyond what's available through the delocalization subgraph. As a result, many bonding arrangements such as those found in organometallics and delocalization-stabilized ions can not be encoded. Zero-order bonds are not supported. Only four-coordinate, tetrahedral stereocenters can be encoded, which precludes many forms of chirality such as helical chirality, all forms of non-tetrahedral stereochemistry, and lone-pair tetrahedral centers. Conformational restrictions other than those found in isolated double bonds are not supported, precluding important molecules exhibiting atropisomerism for example. Formats such as CDXML and molfile support enhanced stereochemical features enabling the differentiation of various kinds of partial stereochemical information, but Balsa does not.