Official Business Registers as a Company Data Source

Official business registers can tell you that a company legally exists, its registered name and number, its legal form, its registered address, its incorporation date and its current status, and in many countries its officers and filed accounts. They usually cannot tell you what the company actually does day to day, where it really operates, how many people work there now, its website, or how to reach the right person. Treat a register as the authority for legal identity and status, then add other sources for everything else, recording which source each fact came from and when it was checked.

Registers are one of the main sources behind SyntoraData, so we spend a lot of time with their strengths and their limits. This post sets both out.

What is an official business register?

A business register (also called a company register or commercial register) is the government-run record of legal entities in a country or region. Companies must file information with it when they are formed and keep it updated afterwards. Many registers publish part of that information openly, either through a search website, bulk downloads or an API.

Because the data is filed by the companies themselves under a legal obligation, and maintained by an official body, it is the closest thing to an authoritative answer about a company's legal identity.

What can a company register tell you reliably?

These fields are usually the strongest:

• Legal name, exactly as registered, including the legal form.
• Registration number, the unique identifier in that register.
• Legal form, such as private limited company, public company or partnership.
• Status: active, dissolved, in liquidation, struck off.
• Incorporation date, and dissolution date where relevant.
• Registered office address, the official address for legal correspondence.

Depending on the country, registers may also publish:

• Officers and directors, sometimes with appointment dates.
• Filed accounts, from which size and financial health can be estimated.
• Declared business activity, often as an industry code.
• Shareholders or beneficial owners, in some jurisdictions, under specific access rules.
• Name changes and history, so you can trace a company through rebrands.

What can a register not tell you?

The gaps are just as important:

• Real activity. The declared activity code is chosen at incorporation and often never updated. A company registered under a broad code may now do something quite different.
• Where the company operates. The registered office is frequently an accountant's or formation agent's address, shared by hundreds of companies.
• Current headcount. Some registers publish employee numbers in filed accounts, but those can be a year or more old, and small companies are often exempt from reporting them.
• Website and contact details. Most registers do not hold a website, a general email address or a phone number.
• Trading names and brands. The legal name and the name customers know can differ completely.
• Group structure across borders. A register sees its own jurisdiction. A subsidiary's parent abroad may only appear as a name.

Why do registers differ so much between countries?

Each country decides what companies must file, what is public, how it can be accessed and on what terms it can be reused. In practice this means:

• Fields differ. Some registers publish directors and accounts openly; others publish little beyond name, number and status.
• Access differs. Some offer free bulk data or APIs, others only paid lookups one company at a time.
• Reuse terms differ. Some data is under open licences, some restricts commercial reuse, and some personal data, such as directors' details, carries data protection obligations. Check the licence before building anything on it.
• Freshness differs. Some registers update daily, others publish periodic snapshots.

So "register data" is a different thing in every country, and a multi-country dataset has to keep track of which register each record came from.

How do global identifiers help?

Some identifiers work across borders and help link records together:

• LEI (Legal Entity Identifier), a global code used mainly in financial reporting, with a public database that includes legal name, address and, in many cases, parent relationships.
• Wikidata, an open knowledge base where larger companies often have entries linking to their website, register number and other identifiers.

They mostly cover larger or regulated companies, but where they exist, they make it much easier to confirm that two records describe the same entity.

How do you combine register data with other sources?

A reliable company record is built in layers, each fact tagged with its source:

1. Start from the register for legal name, number, form, status, incorporation date and registered address.
2. Add global identifiers such as LEI and Wikidata where they match.
3. Find the company's own website and confirm it belongs to the same entity, for example through a registration number in the site's legal notice.
4. Read the public website for what the company says it does, its trading name, and the general contact details it publishes.
5. Add licensed datasets for fields such as estimated size, where you have the right to use them.
6. Record the source and check date for every field, and re-check on a schedule, since status and contact details change.

When sources disagree, the register wins on legal facts and the company's own website usually wins on what it does today. Keep both values and their dates rather than overwriting one with the other. Our earlier guide to building an ideal customer profile explains why unsourced firmographics make for weak targeting.

What mistakes do people make with register data?

• Treating the registered address as the location of the business and its staff.
• Trusting the activity code without checking what the company actually does.
• Ignoring status, and contacting or selling to dissolved companies.
• Assuming the licence allows any use, especially for personal data such as directors' names.
• Not recording the snapshot date, so nobody knows how old the data is.

Working with Syntora Ai

SyntoraData, the product Syntora Ai builds and runs, starts each company record from official registers and global identifiers, then adds what the company publishes on its own website, with the source and check date shown for every fact. If you need company data you can trace, write to hello@syntorahq.ai or see our growth and data practice.