New Jersey Secretary of State Business Search

You can try to find business information for companies in New Jersey through the Business Records Service, courtesy of the New Jersey Treasury Department's Division of Revenue and Enterprise Services. You won't find much information readily available, however. Below we'll walk through why this is, 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 New Jersey might suffice (costly as it may be). 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 at the New Jersey Secretary of State Corporation and Business Entity Search website, found linked above. When you arrive, you'll see a very basic search interface.

While you can choose to search by the common fields (company name, ID number, the names of Principals or Registered Agents), there are no advanced search options available.

After completing the search, you'll be directed to the search results page.

The results page shows only very basic information - the business name and ID, the city in which they're located, and the original filing date. On this page, there's no distinction even between companies that are still active and those that aren't. The only thing you can do is to sort the data in the columns by clicking on the headers.

Ordinarily, you might expect to click through to a business details page. That's not possible here. All you can do is to click the checkboxes for the information you'd like to obtain, like so.

After you add the requested documents to your cart, you can visit the cart to order them … as long as you've got a credit card number to pay for them.

The Business Status Report contains the following information:

• Name

• Status

• Original Formation Date

• Annual Report Information

• Registered Agent

• Associated Name

• Filing History

The page offers a sample business report, which you can find here - https://www.njportal.com/dor/businessrecords/Samples/SampleBEStatusReports.pdf

Unlike some other states, in New Jersey you won't find any detailed business information for free. They will, however, link you to a service where you can find information for businesses in New Jersey and in other states. However, that's only possible with a paid subscription. The only information you'll find at no cost is a commercial nationwide business directory offering only basic contact information.

New Jersey offers only limited information for free. If you need to search for hundreds - or even thousands - of these records each month, however, this would quickly consume a lot of time and money. Furthermore, Secretary of State data is different from one state to another, so combining and integrating data from multiple states is complex.