Cost to register
How to find a business
Walkthrough of Kentucky Secretary of State Registry
Registry of cached businesses in Kentucky
Find the status definitions for Kentucky
Entity Name
Status
Search By Address
Search By Person
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
Screenshot
UCC Liens
Tin Verification
Form 5500 Series Data
The state of Kentucky 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, Kentucky's search portal allows you to find information fairly 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 Kentucky's Business Filings & Records Online Services page linked above. There's a lot of information on that landing page; you'll find the online search options by scrolling down a bit. Here's what you're looking for:
Each type of search is found at a different link. The link to search for a business name brings you to a very simple search interface, like so:
Curiously, there are more options for limiting search results under the other types of search (for example, in the other searches you can filter for active companies only). A search for a business name returns all matching records by default. The results page looks like this:
There's limited information here, only the name of the business, the Organization Number, the current status of the business (which links up with the color coding - green for active, red for inactive), and the type of business that it is.
All the results are returned on a single page. The results are sorted by company name in alphabetical order by default. You cannot reverse the default order, or sort by another field.
Clicking on the name of a business will bring you to the details page for that business. Those pages look like this:
Here you can view more information about the business, including important filing dates, name and contact information for the Registered Agent, and the mailing address for the Principal Office.
There's one feature on this page that could be useful in cross-referencing information: you can click on the company and name listed as Registered Agent to quickly search for other companies for which they act in that capacity.
Any document filed by the business after 2004 is available to view as a scanned image or PDF (and it appears that they're working to create electronic versions of earlier documents). Here's another record (albeit an inactive company) with more of those documents available for viewing:
There is a button near the top of the screen offering to subscribe to email notifications for this business. To do that, however, you first need to create an account for the site.
One final observation: the website is slow. The search performed in the examples above took several seconds to display the results, and clicking other buttons on the site caused lengthy delays as well.
Kentucky offers a modest amount of business information at no cost, and while the site is a bit slow, their search interface makes the process relatively simple 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.