Kansas Secretary of State Business Search

The state of Kansas 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 Kansas 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 initial business search page linked above. The page looks like this:

This entry page allows you to choose to perform several types of searches: by name, by the state's Business ID, or by the name of a resident agent for the business.

If you click through to the name search, you'll find this very basic search interface:

There are no options to limit your search in any way - not even to results that 'begin with' or 'contain' your search term. This could get frustrating in some cases, as the search will only return a maximum of 400 results.

When you perform the search, you'll be taken to the results page (I'm happy to report that this didn't take anywhere near the threatened 60 seconds). That page looks like this:

The results are delivered all on a single page, 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, ID Number, and its current status.

Clicking on the 'View Record' button for any of the records will bring you to the Business Summary page for that business. Those pages look like this:

Here you can view more information about the business that isn't displayed on the results page. This includes a mailing address for the business, the date the company was formed and the state in which it was formed, and contact information for the Resident Agent. You can also see information related to the filings for the business, including the date of the last filing, and the next due date.

Most of the buttons pertain specifically to the owner of a business, and will direct to a login page.

The one exception is the 'View History and Documents' button. Clicking that button first brings up a window to declare that you won't use the information for prohibited purposes:

After confirming that declaration, you can then see a list of the filings that are available online:

Each scanned document is available as a PDF to view, save, or print.

Kansas offers a reasonable amount of business information at no cost, but their search functionality is very limited, returning many irrelevant results for each search. 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.