Washington Secretary of State Business Search
November 17, 2021 Update: We have now released a free tool that allows you to perform a Washington Secretary of State business search or any other state from one central location. Check out the verify a business tool:
The WA secretary of state business search is one of the most robust SOS searches in the United States. It’s advanced search offers the ability to search by business type, status, date ranges for the time of registration, and much more. Here’s the link for the advanced search. Look at it, it’s beautiful!
I rate it 10 out of 10
Washington is my favorite Secretary of State business search. It deserves the 10 out of 10.
Pros
- Search by officer and registered agent name
- Search by entity status
- Search by entity filing range
- Has officer information on the details page
- Has industry on details page
- Can view documents from details page
- Has phone number and email on documents
- Has the ability to download businesses as CSV
Cons
- What? What con does it have?
Looking up a business
In the above picture I input “PIZZA” in the business name field and then changed my date range to the last two months. Very quickly it returned a list of 20 businesses. 20 businesses registered with the name of “PIZZA” in the last few months is quite a few. Lots of entrepreneurs out there starting businesses, which is awesome.
There is a lot of detail shown in this summary table, such as the business type, its status, and addresses. But there is also a details section which has much, much more.
Business details
The WA secretary of state business search offers a details section for every business. These sections include things like when the business was registered, who the responsible party is for the business, and the registered agent in charge of handling any processing documents.
I’m going to select “KING PIZZA LLC”. It sounds like it’s going to be a delicious place to eat. This particular business has a commercial registered agent and two governors, which are typically the owners of the business.
Look at all of that awesome information! We can learn a ton of information from these filings.
Bonus: WA SOS business search has an export to CSV!
I’m a big fan of data and parsing through lots of it. So being able to go through the data one by one is a lot less preferred to being able to export it to a CSV and do lots with it.
Not every state has this but Washington having one of the better secretary of state searches definitely does have it. It’s kind of hard to notice so here’s a screenshot:
Check it. Bottom right of the search results page has a little “CSV”. The file just summarizes the data as seen in the search results page so it won’t have the extra information that comes from the details page. Still, it’s a really good list of actionable data. It’ll look something like this:
Extra Credit
For all of my power users out there. You can access any of this business data via API. This can be handy for things like:
- Business verification
- KYC/KYB (know your business) anti-money laundering
- Business credit check
- Finding business owner information
It’s as simple as this. Here’s also a post that talks more about getting WA Secretary of State data via API.
let url = `https://apigateway.cobaltintelligence.com/v1/search?searchQuery=${encodeURIComponent(businessName)}&state=${state}`;
const axiosResponse = await axios.get(url, {
headers: {
'x-api-key': this.apiKey
}
});
return axiosResponse.data;Get a free Secretary of State API key here.
Video Transcript:
Hello there. I’m Jordan Hansen. My Mike’s all messed up. All right. I’m from cobalt intelligence today. We’re going to go over Washington, secretary of state business search. That’s the goal. We’re going to go over here and show how to use it. And the advanced search. It’s really impressive how good their business searches.
Um, so that’s what we’re going to go into. We’ll take a few minutes here to go through it. Um, so we’ll go to the advanced businesses. Uh, Washington is by far one of the best of the secretary of state’s that you can search for. You can. The cool thing is when you can search by date, anytime you can search by date, that’s really powerful.
You can find out newly registered businesses, older, registered businesses. You can also search by agent name or governor even. So you come over here and you want to know who the owner is, or, you know, how many businesses bill owns. You can do that. All right. So we’re going to come over here and look. So it’s all here.
You can search by, contains whatever we’re gonna search. Uh, we’re gonna search by pizza and I’m just gonna sec select over here. Prepare the last like three months. Let’s say since July, till today we say search, how many businesses look 20? All right. So we have 20 businesses here that were registered with the name of pizza in the last 20 days.
That’s kind of, or in the last three months, that’s pretty impressive. 20 businesses in three months with the pizza. Um, aggressive, look at this. This is kind of funny. This person has the same, uh, same business, right? They’re just registered in a bunch of different, uh, states or a bunch of different cities.
That makes sense. So here we go. This is the business summary page. You can see a list. Oh, look how. Let’s make that font a little bigger. When you say there we go, that’s better. So we can see a lot more information here. We can see why the business name, their address, and it’s even cool as, as a part where you can go into details.
We’re going to go to the details page. We can select on any of these and you can see bam, here’s the details. The cool thing is you get addresses. You get the registered agent, who is the person who should be processing paperwork. If they get served or anything like that. Send it to as the registered agent and you can also get the governor, which is the people that own the business.
And so this is kind of cool. Let’s see. I’ve never even tried this print button. Let’s try it right. This print button, what happens. Okay. So just cause it’s all the information out in a PDF. So nothing fancy there. Um, finally hit you with a stick that, okay. This is just the history of it or view documents.
That sounds interesting. What does this button do? Oh, downloaded some PDF here. Okay. So this is actually shows, he says a PDF of when the document was found. Okay. That’s cool too. All right. Um, now the other cool thing, and this is what’s going on here. Alright is that Washington has this neat thing where you can check out, um, you can export to CSV.
This is a really cool part of it. So very simple here. You can see, I can come through. We can search. You can filter by a bunch of different things. You can also come over here and use this. Oh, you can’t hold, hold on like this. Bam, look, see that button right there. CSV export does push it. Bam, download there.
Hold on. It’s opening it up. I’m gonna open it up. I don’t want to put up with my code. I want to open it up with notepad. Um, let me get me myself out of the way again. All right. There we go. So look at that. Now we have our list of businesses. So this is pretty cool for me. I’m, you know, I’m a data guy. I like going through and parsing this data.
This gives us a good opportunity to get a list of those businesses and we can do stuff with it. If we wanted, you know, we can loop through it, whatever, if you’re a developer, this is the part that’s probably more for you. We’re going to talk about what you can do with this. And so you can handle this here’s this list right here.
So let’s say. Um, you’re a developer. You want to find out more information because right here, this is just the summary information. And you want to go through in the say, listen, there’s 2,500 or 750 businesses in this export. Uh, you want to get the information for all of them, who the owners are, all that information.
What we can do that. And that’s what I’m talking about here today is a little bit is the secretary of state API. This is the bonus parts, right? So if you’re not a developer, you should hang up right now. Turn this stream off, turn this video off, and then, um, we’ll go over here. So we’ll go over here to cobalt intelligence.
Um, maybe if I knew how to do it, we’ll go here. The secretary of state right there. And so here, we’ve got our list, right? I’m gonna make it smaller. So we’ll go over here like this. Okay. What about, uh, this one? Mucho pizza, Inc. Their search we’ll put in Washington. Come on. There we go and try it. So this is what the secretary of state APA does.
You couldn’t go out and search business information all via API, and that’s what this should hopefully be doing right now. Should we turn all the business information? And so the cool thing is you have a list of 2000. Oh, there it is. Bam. Right there even comes with, um, which would pizza Inc. And filing date, look at that nine, nine.
So that was the correct one. Uh, it even comes with. Uh, emails and phone numbers. We can get emails and phone numbers in Washington, and you can parcel a list of a thousand, 10,000 very easily. Just go through and create the API. If you want an API keys, click this button here. Um, but that’s how you use the Washington secretary of state business search.
Um, it’s really good. There’s a really good one. Great. At advanced search and, uh, that’s all I want to talk about today. So we’re going to have some information in the link of how you do it, where you access this, um, the link to this and how you can use the search and everything there. All right.