Cost to register
How to find a business
Walkthrough of Ohio Secretary of State Registry
Registry of cached businesses in Ohio
Find the status definitions for Ohio
You can find business information for companies in Ohio through the Secretary of State's website. Thanks to a few helpful filters you can apply at the front end, searches are simple and straightforward. 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, the search portal offered by the Ohio Secretary of State allows you to find what 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 business information at the Ohio Secretary of State's business search page, found linked above. When you arrive, you'll see a clean search interface:
As mentioned above, when you enter the business name you're looking for, you can filter the results you'll see in a number of ways. Selecting from the choices in the left-hand menu, you can search by the business name (in which case there are Boolean search operations you can apply), the exact business name, a prior business name, the agent or registrant for the company as well as its organizer or incorporator, or by the entity number.
Even better, when you're performing a search for the business name, you can filter results to only see companies that are active, canceled, or 'dead'.
Search results are returned 10 at a time, but there's a lot of information available in the table of results - the date and state of initial registration, the county in which the company is located, and the entity number. Helpfully, you can sort these columns by the information they contain by clicking on the header.
At the bottom of the results page, there are buttons that allow you to download all of the results - yes, all of them! - as either a CSV or PDF file.
When you click to view the details of a business, you'll arrive at a page with the typical additional information - the name and contact information of the principals, important filing dates, and even links to download images of documents on file.
There's one additional feature that Ohio's Secretary of State business search offers: you can sign up for alerts on specific businesses that you need to track over time, so you'll be notified anytime there's a change to the information on file. It's free of charge, too!
Ohio's Secretary of State offers one of the most feature-rich searches for business information. However, 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.