Massachusetts Secretary of State Business Search

Massachusetts makes it relatively simple to look up business information through the website of the Office of the Secretary of the Commonwealth. 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, the Massachusetts search portal allows you to find the data 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 Secretary of the Commonwealth's corporation search page linked above. The landing page looks like this:

The search interface is very basic. You can search by the company name, the name of an agent or principal associated with the business, by the Identification Number, or by a filing number. For each of these, you can choose to search for results that begin with, contain ('Full Text'), an exact match, or a 'sound alike' ('Soundex') match for your search term. Beyond this, the search page offers no advanced search options at all, meaning that a search will likely return many irrelevant results.

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. Clicking on any of the headers allows you to sort the columns by that field, or to reverse the sort order.

There's only limited information on the results page: the company's name and ID number (plus the old ID number if there is one), and the address.

The 'Print Results' button at the top of the search result is in reality only a 'print screen' button. It only allows you to print the current page, and only the information visible on that page.

Note that the search returns both active and inactive companies - in this case, for example, the first company listed was voluntarily dissolved in 2003, which you only learn when clicking through to the Business Entity Summary page. Those pages look like this:

Here you can view more detailed information about the business, including names of the principals and Registered Agents, mailing and location addresses, filing dates, the state in which they were formed (in the case of an out-of-state company like this one), and more.

The only additional information available for each business are the filings, which you can view by clicking the button at the bottom of the page.

For each of the records, you can view and download a PDF copy of the filing. If you need a certified copy, you can order one for a fee.

Massachusetts offers a reasonable amount of business information at no cost, but the search functionality is limited and basic. 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.