Rhode Island Secretary of State Business Search

The state of Rhode Island 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, Rhode Island'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 fairly extensive, offering a wide variety of search options, and ways to filter your results. You can look up any business by:

• Name of Business

• Name of an Individual (an officer or director of the company)

• State ID number

• Filing Number

• Registered Agent

• Business Address

• Purpose

• NAICS Code

The last two options are unique among Secretary of State search pages, allowing searches for all companies that sell a specific service or product.

Helpfully, the search defaults to businesses that are currently active, but you can also choose to search for inactive businesses. Although the search interface is quite intuitive as is, the site also offers a very clear and comprehensive search tips page (https://www.sos.ri.gov/divisions/business-services/search-assistance-corporate-database).

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

The results are sorted by company name in alphabetical order. You can reverse the sort order (A-Z to Z-A), and sort by a different field, by clicking on the column header.

On the results page, you'll see each company's name, ID Number, its NAICS code, and its primary address. If you've searched for inactive businesses, the specific status is also displayed here.

Clicking on the business name for any of the records will bring you to the Entity Summary page for that business. The summary information is displayed vertically on a single page, so let's look at the top half first:

Here you can view more information about the business, including the date at which they were registered in the state, addresses for the principal office and the mailing address (which in some cases would be different), and the name and contact information for the Registered Agent for the business.

Towards the bottom of the page you'll find some additional information:

If there are individual managers named for the business, their names and addresses would be displayed here. Additionally, the purpose of the business, and its primary NAICS code (both the number and the type of business it denotes) are shown here.

There's also a list of filings available for the business; you can scroll through the list to see if a specific filing is available. If you click the 'View filings' button, you're taken to this page:

Here you can see the type of document that was filed, the year and date of the filing, and teh filing number.

We'll overlook the fact that the 'check all' feature is not available, and none of the checkboxes operate. The links on the right side of the page are all functional, allowing you to view or download those documents.

Rhode Island 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.