Michigan Secretary of State Business Search

You can find business information for companies in Michigan through the office of the Secretary of State. The search functionality is fairly basic, but easy to use. Below we'll walk through how to use the service, and show you some additional resources you might not know about.

There are a number of reasons you might need this information. It's absolutely critical when performing due diligence and Know Your Client (KYC) purposes when you're onboarding new customers. If you're only performing these kinds of searches occasionally, the search portal offered by Michigan might be helpful to you. 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 Service through the Michigan State Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs (LARA) Corporations Online Filing System, found linked above. When you arrive, you'll see a very basic search interface.

There are no advanced search filters available here; you can only limit the results for your search term by 'Begins With', 'Exact Match', 'Keyword', or - a unique option - 'Soundex'. You can also choose to search by the name of a Principal or Registered Agent, or by ID Number or Filing Number. Before you click through to your search results, you can choose to display 25, 50, or 100 results per page.

The results page shows only basic information - the business name and ID number(s), and the address on file. On this page, there's no distinction even between companies that are still active and those that aren't. You can sort the data in the columns by clicking on the header. The 'Print Results' button, however, only prints the list on each page as you see it (i.e. this is more accurately a 'print screen' button).

When you click through to a business record, you can find more information than was available on the search page - the name and contact information for a Resident Agent, important filing dates, and so on.

On this details page, you can see whether the business is still active (as in the example above), or whether there is some other status noted (e.g. “Date of In Existence But Not In Good Standing: 02/24/2012”, or “Date of Dissolved: 02/27/2018”). You can also click through to see any assumed names used for the business. In this case, you can see why the business was returned as a search result for 'Acme'.

Clicking to 'View Filings', you'll be taken to a list of these documents, with the option to view and save a PDF copy of each one, or to order a certified copy (at cost).

Michigan offers a reasonable amount of business information at no cost, and with relatively easy (albeit limited) search functionality. If you need to search for hundreds - or even thousands - of these records each month, however, 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.