Arkansas Secretary of State Business Search

The state of Arkansas 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, the search portal for Arkansas 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 Arkansas business search page linked above. The landing page looks like this:

The search interface is very basic, offering a few different things you can search for, but very few options to limit your results.

You can look up any business by name (or its fictional name), by the name, city, or state of the Registered Agent, or by the Filing Number.

You can only limit your results by searching for a specific type of business (Domestic Corporation, Domestic LLP, Foreign Corporation, Foreign LLC, etc.). The search page offers no options for limiting results to records that begin with, contain, or are an exact match for your search term. There is also no option to limit results to active companies only.

When you perform the search, you'll be directed to the results page, which looks like this:

The results are delivered on a single screen. The 'printer friendly' link does offer the option to print the entire list.

The results are sorted by company name in alphabetical order. You cannot reverse the default order, or sort by another field.

On the results page, you'll see only basic information for each company: its name, its city and state, and the current status of the company.

Clicking on the name for any of the records will bring you to the details page for that business. Those pages look like this:

There's only basic additional information available on this page. Aside from the name and any fictitious names for the business, here you'll find:

• Information related to the business filing

• The Principal Address for the business

• Name and contact information for the Registered Agent

• Officers of the company

• State of origin (if the company is 'Foreign', as in this case, meaning it was formed in a state other than Arkansas)

There are no options here to view any filings for the business, or any additional information about the company.

Incidentally, there were two options on the main landing page that might have caught your eye: 'Corporations Bulk Data Download' and 'Business Entity Special Request List Builder'. While those are options, you have to be a paid subscriber to the Information Network of Arkansas (INA) to access them.

Arkansas offers only limited business information at no cost, and their search interface is very basic and limited. If you need to search for hundreds - or even thousands - of these records each month, though, this would quickly consume a lot of time. Furthermore, Secretary of State data is different from one state to another, so combining and integrating data from multiple states is complex.