Oregon Secretary of State Business Search

The state of Oregon 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 for Know Your Client (KYC) purposes. If you're only performing these kinds of searches occasionally, Oregon'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 could go to the 'Find a Business' basic search page, but I recommend bypassing that and going straight to the advanced search page, which you can find linked above.

The landing page looks like this:

You can search for a business by name, or by the Registry Number. The search methods listed take some interpretation at first, but using these, you can limit your results to records that begin with, contain, are an exact match for, or sound like your search term.

You can also choose to see active or inactive companies, or both, by clicking the box at the right.

When you perform the search, you'll be directed to the results page, which looks like this:

The results are returned all in a single page, and they're sorted by company name in alphabetical order. You cannot reverse the default order, or sort by another field. The column headings that are active links will take you to a definitions page, explaining what each abbreviation stands for.

In addition to the business name, on the results page you can see the entity type (the legal structure of the business), the current status (all active here, since the search was limited to just those), the Registry Number, and the Name Status (current, former, etc.).

Where 'Search' appears in the 'Assoc Search' column, there are additional businesses linked - or associated - with that company. Clicking 'Search' displays them.

Clicking on the name or Registry Number for any of the records will bring you to the Business Entity Data page for that business. Those pages look like this:

Here you can view additional information about the business, including address information for the company and the Registered Agent, and the name history (where and when names have changed over time). Once again on this page, any headings that are linked will take you to a page showing the list of possible designations, and their meaning.

On this page, you can also see a list of documents on file for the business. Clicking on the page icon will take you to a scan or a PDF of that document, where you can print or download it.

The 'Printer Friendly' links bring up the same information you see on the page, but without any colored background.

Oregon 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.