Connecticut Secretary of State Business Search

The state of Connecticut 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, Missouri'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 Records Search page above. The landing page looks like this:

The search interface is simple and basic, reminiscent of Google. Almost too simple, in fact; there's not even the option to limit a search by 'begins with' or 'contains'. The Advanced Search link was an appealing option to limit results, but as it turns out, this only offers the option to search for different information. In addition to searching by the business name, you can search for an address, ALEI (Authoritative Legal Entity Identifier), Filing Number, the name of a Principal or an Agent, or the city in which the business is located.

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

Curiously, Connecticut hides some of its best features here. You can export your results to a CSV file (and yes, all of the results are exported, not just those appearing on the first page). You can save a link to the search results, if you might need them again.

Over on the left, it gets even better. Here, you can filter your results (in a way that one might have expected the Advanced Search to allow). You can filter by:

• Start and/or end date of the business

• Status of the business (active, dissolved, merged, etc.)

• Business Type (foreign or domestic)

• Entity Type (there are seventeen options here, including LLC, LLP, Stock Corporation, etc.)

The results are sorted by company name in alphabetical order by default. At the top right, there's a dropdown menu that allows you to sort the business by its ALEI or zip code.

On the results page, a fair amount of information is displayed in 'card' format. In one place, you can see the business name, its ALEI, its address, and the names of Principals and its Registered Agent.

Clicking on the card for any of the records will bring you to the details page for that business. There's a lot of information on this page, and it's all presented vertically. The tabs across the top of the list - Business Details, Filing History, Name History, and Shares - function as links to jump to each section. Let's look at each section separately.

At the top of the page you'll find the Business Details:

There's a lot of information available here. You can see important dates - the date the company was formed, the due date for its Annual Report, and the year the last report was filed. This page also displays the company's NAICS code and subcode.

Scrolling down a bit further, you can see the people involved in the business:

Interestingly, Connecticut's business search provides not only the primary business address of Principals and Registered Agents, but also their residence address.

Further down is the Filing History for the business:

None of the documents are available to be viewed as images or downloaded as files, but the details for each filing are there.

At the bottom of the record, you'll find the Name History (reflecting any name changes over the years) and details as to the Shares in the business.

One last kudos to Connecticut's page - unlike some others, it's fully responsive, formatting the display to the browser dimensions and type.

Connecticut offers a generous amount of business information at no cost, and their search interface makes the process relatively smooth and simple for each search - especially when you use the filters on the results page. 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.