Colorado Secretary of State Business Search

The state of Colorado makes it fairly difficult to look up business information via the website of the Secretary of State, and the information you'll find is scant at best. Those difficulties aside, 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, Colorado's search portal allows you to find some information. 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'll find the Colorado Secretary of State's Business Entity Search portal above.

The very basic search page looks like this:

As you can see, there are no options for filtering the search - not even limiting the search by 'begins with' or 'contains'. If you enter a name for which too many matches are returned, you're instructed to enter more or different information.

Hmm, okay. Let's try putting the name along with an ID number that starts with 1.

Oops, that doesn't work either.

When - through trial and error - you've finally entered enough information to successfully complete a search, you're taken to the results page, which looks like this:

Only the most basic information may be found here; for each record, you'll see the ID number, the name of the business, and the address. And as you can see, the search has returned all matching companies, with no distinction between those that are still active and those that have been dissolved.

Clicking on the ID number for the company you'd like to view brings you to the information page for that business.

The 'Organization Record Confirmation' page displays a bit more information than the search page, but not much. Here, you can find the Registered Agent for the business, the current status, the form (or legal structure) of the company, and the date it was formed.

You might think that clicking the 'Confirm' button brings you to a screen offering more detailed information about the company. Alas, you'd be incorrect.

Somewhat confusingly, clicking that button only brings you to a new search page, through which you can search for secured transactions records.

Colorado offers only the most basic business information, and the search functionality is limited and frustrating. If you need to search for hundreds - or even thousands - of these records each month, 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.