Missouri Secretary of State Business Search

The state of Missouri 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, Missouri'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.

You can find the Business Entity search page linked above. The landing page looks like this:

The search interface is simple and basic. Using the dropdown menu at the top, you can look up any business by name, by the name of the Registered Agent, or by the Charter Number. You can limit your results to records that begin with, contain, or are an exact match for your search term. Beyond that, you can only limit results to active companies, by clicking the box.

It's a minor frustration (perhaps a first world problem?), but the AI chatbot at the bottom right of the screen is often in the way. You can click to dismiss it, but it reappears on the next page.

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 name (and any previous names), Charter Number, the type of business (its legal structure), its status, the date it was created, and the Registered Agent. Unlike some other states, you can click on the name of a Registered Agent to view their standing with the Secretary of State, and cross-reference other businesses for which they are also a Registered Agent.

Clicking on the name or Charter Number for any of the records 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 names of the Governing Person (or persons), mailing and location addresses, important dates such as their renewal month and the due date for their Annual Report, the state in which they were formed, and more.

This is all found on the default tab, which is General Information.

Clicking on the 'Filings' tab displays a list of filed documents, which you can click to preview, and download.

The Principal Office Address tab displays the same principal address and Registered Agent address as the main page. This seems redundant, but clicking the box to show previous addresses displays more information.

Missouri offers a reasonable amount of business information at no cost, and their search interface makes the process relatively smooth and 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.