Cost to register
How to find a business
Walkthrough of California Secretary of State Registry
Registry of cached businesses in California
Find the status definitions for California
Entity Name
Status
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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
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UCC Liens
Tin Verification
Form 5500 Series Data
California makes it relatively simple to look up business information through the office 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 Know Your Client (KYC) purposes. If you're only performing these kinds of searches occasionally, the California Business Search portal allows you to find the data 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 California's Business Search portal by clicking linked above. The landing page looks like this:
At the moment, information for LLPs (Limited Liability Partnerships) and GPs (General Partnerships) in California aren't available online, but hard copies can be requested by mail.
The basic search function makes it easy: just type in all or part of the business name, and the 500 records most closely matching the search are displayed right away.
If the search produces too many records, you can use the advanced search function to narrow your results by several criteria - type of business, date of initial filing, and more.
In the table displaying all the results, you'll find the information organized in several columns:
Entity Information
This displays the official name, and the registration number, for each business. Clicking on the name opens a sidebar with some additional information, including more detailed contact information, the business's standing with the Secretary of State, the Franchise Tax Board, the Victims of Corporate Fraud Compensation Fund, and the standing of the Agent.
Initial Filing Date
In this column, you'll find the date the company initially filed with the office. These dates can range from within days of performing the search, back to the 1800's.
Status
This column shows whether the company's registration is still active, or inactive, in which case it gives the reason (Suspended, Terminated, Forfeited, Merged Out, etc.)
Entity Type
This shows the legal structure of the company - typically a Legacy Corporation or a Stock Corporation (as noted above, LLPs and GPs won't be shown in the results)
Formed In
Many companies doing business in California were started in other states. This column displays the state in which the business was first formed
Agent
In this column, you'll find the name for the business's agent of record. In many cases, this person is a principal in the company. By clicking on the company name to open the sidebar, you can find contact information for the Agent
If you still have a lot of records to sift through after applying filters, you can sort the data in the columns (A-Z, Z-A) by clicking on the two small arrows.
As you've seen, performing a search for a single company is relatively straightforward, and doesn't take a lot of time. If you need to search for hundreds - or even thousands - of these records each month, though, this task can quickly add up into hours of time. Furthermore, Secretary of State data is different from one state to another, so combining and integrating data from multiple states is complex.