Cost to register
How to find a business
Walkthrough of Alabama Secretary of State Registry
Registry of cached businesses in Alabama
Find the status definitions for Alabama
Entity Name
Status
Search By Address
Search By Person
State of Formation
Filing Date
Entity Type
Industry
Officer Information
Organization Documents
Entity Id
Agent Name
Agent Address
Physical Address
Mailing Address
Secretary of State URL
Phone Number
Screenshot
UCC Liens
Tin Verification
Form 5500 Series Data
The state of Alabama makes it relatively simple to look up business information through the website of the Secretary of State. Below we'll walk through the steps for doing this, and show you some additional resources you might not know about.
There are any number of reasons you might need this information. It's absolutely critical when performing due diligence and for Know Your Client (KYC) purposes. If you're only performing these kinds of searches occasionally, Alabama's search portal allows you to find the information you're looking for quickly and easily. If you're searching records like these in high numbers, there are some tools you'll want to know about, but we'll come back to that in just a moment.
You can find the Business Entity Records search page here. The landing page looks like this:
As you can see, there's a separate link for each type of search that you might wish to perform. You can choose to search by name, Entity Number, the name of an Officer, Agent, or Incorporator, the month and year a business was formed (the specific month, not a range), the specific date it was registered, or by the reservation ID number.
Clicking on any of the search links opens a new browser tab with that search interface. The name search page looks like this:
The search interface is simple and clean. When you enter all or part of the name, you can limit your results to businesses formed in a specific county, or with a principal address in a specific city. Under 'Type', there are dozens of options, all related to the legal structure of the business. The 'Status' menu allows you to restrict your results to companies currently in existence, ones that have been consolidated, merged, withdrawn, and so forth.
Performing the search brings you to the results page, which looks like this:
The results are sorted by company name in alphabetical order by default. Clicking on the column headers allows you to reverse the search order, and to sort by the other fields.
On the results page, you'll see each company's name and ID number, the city in which it's located, the type of business, and its status (all 'Exists' here, as I chose to limit the search to only those).
Clicking on the name or ID for any of the records will bring you to the details page for that business. All of the information for each business is arranged vertically on the same page, so let's look at the top half of the page first:
Here, you can see more information about the business if it was provided to the office, including name and contact information for the Registered Agent, the date the company was formed, and some information about the capital in the business.
On the lower half of the page, you'll find some additional information:
The Incorporator's name and address are there if they've been provided, plus links to documents. Documents are available to purchase. You can view the Annual Reports for the business summarized in an online form, which looks like this: