Cost to register
How to find a business
Walkthrough of Indiana Secretary of State Registry
Registry of cached businesses in Indiana
Find the status definitions for Indiana
The state of Indiana 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 Know Your Client (KYC) purposes. If you're only performing these kinds of searches occasionally, Indiana'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.
It takes a bit of digging - and more than a few mouse clicks - to find the search portal if you start at the Indiana Secretary of State's website. You can find the INBiz Business Search page linked above. The landing page looks like this:
The search interface is clean and well-organized, and offers a lot of options for refining your search at the outset. You can search by the business name or ID number, the name of the Registered Agent, the Incorporator, or a Governing Person, or the filing number. For any of these, you can limit your search to results that begin with, contain, or are an exact match for your search term.
The advanced search possibilities are extensive. You can filter your search by the type of business (for-profit corporation, LLC, Limited Partnership, etc.), the status of the business (active, inactive, dissolved, merged, etc.), the name type (legal name, former name, assumed name, etc.), and even by the address, city, or zip code for the business.
There is a captcha, but it only periodically requires you to complete 'click the picture' logic tests before proceeding.
When you perform the search, you'll be directed to the results page, which looks like this:
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 each company's Business ID, Business Name, Name Type, Entity Type, Principal Office Address, Registered Agent Name, and Status (all active here, as I limited the search to only active businesses).
Clicking on the Business ID for any of the records will bring you to the Business Details page for that business. (Periodically you may encounter another captcha test.) Those pages look like this:
Here you can view more information about the business, including names of the Governing Person (or persons), mailing and location addresses, important dates like the creation date and when their Business Report is due, the state in which they were formed, and more.
The blue buttons across the bottom of the page offer more information. Filing History produces a list of the documents filed by the business, such as their Articles of Organization, and their Annual Reports. On the Filing History page, you can click to download copies of these documents. Name History and Assumed Name History show any name changes and other names used by the business, if there are any. Indiana also offers the option to order certified copies of filing documents, if they're required, at no cost.
Indiana offers a fairly generous amount of business information at no cost, and their advanced search options make the process relatively smooth for each search. 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.