Virginia Secretary of State Business Search

You can find business information for companies in Virginia through the State Corporation Commission website.Searches are relatively simple and straightforward. Below well 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. Its absolutely critical when performing due diligence and Know Your Client (KYC) purposes when youre onboarding new customers. If youre only performing these kinds of searches occasionally, the search portal offered by the Virginia State Corporation Commission allows you to find what youre looking for fairly quickly and easily. If youre searching records like these in high numbers, there are some tools youll want to know about, but well come back to that in just a moment.

You can find business information at the Virginia State Corporation Commission Clerks Information System, found here. When you arrive, youll see a clean and intuitive search interface.

In addition to searching by the company name, you can search by their ID number, or by the name of Principal or Registered Agent of the company, and by the Filing Number if you know it. You can limit these searches by 'Starts With, Contains, or Exact Match for the term you enter.

Virginia makes filtering your search easy, with a huge selection of parameters to limit your results. You can find these by clicking Advanced Search Options, and youll see this extension appear.

As mentioned above, the options for filtering your search are generous, to say the least. Your options are:

• Entity Type, which you can filter by:

• Limited Liability Corporation

• Stock Corporation

• Limited Partnership

• General Partnership

• Public Service Authority

• Business Trust

• Nonstock Corporation

• Miscellaneous

• Protected Series

• Document Types:

• There are dozens and dozens! Far too many to list here, but some common examples are Annual Report, Articles of Incorporation, Articles of Dissolution, Termination, etc.

• Jurisdiction Type

• Virginia (formed in the state) or Foreign (formed out of state, or in another country)

• Entity Status, which gives four choices: Active, Inactive, Pending Active or Pending Inactive

• Name Type: There are several, but the common options here are Reserved Name, Legal Name, Former Name, and Fictitious Name

• Industry Codes: There are about 50 options. If you need to focus your search on Insurance Companies, Architects, Attorneys-At-Law, or even Orphanages, you can do it here

• Date of Formation: Here, you can provide a window between start and end dates

• Principal or Registered Office Address

The search results page returns 25 records at a time, and theyre arranged alphabetically.

Theres a generous amount of information available on the results page - the Business Name and ID number, the Business Type, the Principals mailing address, the name of the Registered Agent for the business, and the companys Status.

Notice that the search ignores spaces and characters between the letters (in this example, showing A & C Medicaid as a match for acme), and former names show up in the same search as current names.

When you click through to an individual business record, youll see more details (the reason for the companys status, for example, and where the business stands with respect to the registration fees). Helpfully, a number of the headings will give you an interpretation of the information you might find in each field, when you hover over that heading.

On the details page, youll notice that there are several more buttons near the bottom: Filing History, Registered Agent History, Name History, Previous Registrations, Protected Series, Garnishment Designees, and Image Request. Clicking each of these will open a window extension at the bottom of the screen displaying the relevant information. Here, for example, is the Filing History:

Notice the magnifying glass and camera icons at the right of each row.

Clicking on the magnifying glass icon opens a download request window, allowing you to save a copy of the information as a PDF. Clicking on the camera icon will display that information in yet another window extension (when that information can be displayed).

Virginias State Corporation Commission offers simple functionality when searching for business information, and the numerous filters can help you narrow your results. If you need to search for hundreds - or even thousands - of these records each month, however, 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.