Cost to register
How to find a business
Walkthrough of New York Secretary of State Registry
Registry of cached businesses in New York
Find the status definitions for New York
In New York, looking up business information through the office of the Secretary of State is made relatively easy because of a few search filters they offer at the front end. Below we'll walk through the steps for doing this, 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, New York's search portal allows you to find the data you're looking for relatively 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 New York's business information search at the Department of State's Division of Corporations page, found linked above.
As mentioned above, New York's search page offers the helpful opportunity to filter your results as you perform the search.
Here, you type the company name (full or partial) into the Entity Name field, and apply filters as follows:
Search By - This field allows you to search by Entity Name, Department of State ID number, Assumed Name, or Assumed Name ID number.
Entity Type - Here, you can limit your results to Active, Inactive, or Suspended.
Search Functionality - Here, you can force the search to look for the term you have entered as 'Begins With', 'Contains', or 'Base Word' (which is a search for a partial term that is more forgiving, and will return more results).
Entity List - By checking off one or more of these boxes, you can limit the search results that are displayed to Corporations, Limited Liability Companies (LLCs), Limited Partnerships (LPs), and Limited Liability Partnerships (LLPs).
Clicking the 'Search' button takes you to the results page.
Here, you'll find a bit more information than some search pages offer; you can see not only the company name and ID number, but also the date the company was first registered, and even the county in which they're located.
Once you find the record you want to view, clicking on the company name takes you to the full details page.
Here, you'll see all the typical information - name and contact information for the principals, and the other details about the structure of the business, and important dates for initial filing and when the next filing is due.
This initial view is the default 'Entity Display', but there are other details available using the options on the blue menu bar partway down the page. By clicking on the appropriate tab, you can view the Name History (showing any changes of names), Filing History (showing the date certain documents were filed with the office), Merger History and Assumed Name History, where they exist.
Thanks to New York's search filters, it doesn't take too long to find any individual business registered with the Department of State. If you need to search for hundreds - or even thousands - of these records each month, though, this could quickly consume a great deal of time. Furthermore, Secretary of State data is different from one state to another, so combining and integrating data from multiple states is complex.