South Dakota Secretary of State Business Search

The state of South Dakota allows you to search 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, South Dakota'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 South Dakota SOS Business Information Search page linked above. The landing page looks like this:

The search interface is very basic. You can choose to look up any business by name, or by the state's Business ID number. You can only limit your results to records that start with, or contain, your search term. Beyond that, you can only limit results to active entities, by clicking the box.

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

The results are sorted by company name in alphabetical order. If you like, you can reverse the sort order (A-Z to Z-A), or sort by a different field, by clicking the column heading.

The results page displays a generous amount of information about each record. Here, you'll see each company's Business ID, and its type (the legal structure of the business). To the right, you'll find the name of the business and its home state, and the type of name it is (e.g. a former name, or a trade mark). This page also displays the initial filing date for the entity, and the current status of the business.

Clicking on the Business ID number for any of the records will bring you to the details page for that business. Those pages look like this:

Much of the information here is repeated from the search results page, but there are some additional details. In particular, you'll find the principal and mailing addresses for the business (which are sometimes different), and the name and contact information for the Registered Agent.

Scrolling further down the page, you'll find the filing history for the business. Where the documents are linked, clicking doesn't allow a preview option, but rather opens a PDF download dialog box to save the document in question.

You might have noticed a link on the search page offering a bulk download of the business database. That is certainly an option, but a costly one:

As you can see, accessing this business information on an ongoing basis could quickly become prohibitively expensive.

South Dakota offers a reasonable amount of business information at no cost, and their search interface makes the process relatively smooth and simple for each individual 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, and could be quite costly. Furthermore, Secretary of State data is different from one state to another, so combining and integrating data from multiple states is complex.