Companies

What a company record contains, which fields are reliable, and where they come from.

Where a company record comes from

Two sources, and the difference matters:

The register index — name, court, register number, legal form, status. Present for every company, refreshed as the register changes.
The register extract — address, purpose, capital, representatives, incorporation date. Only present once the extract has been fetched and successfully parsed for that company.

A company with only source 1 is not an error. It is a company whose extract has not been retrieved. See Data coverage for how often that is the case.

The record

{
  "id": "c359aa06-1ac0-4dab-9c60-d5c69a06ff2c",
  "object": "company",
  "name": "Enduro Reise & Training GmbH",
  "status": "active",
  "legal_form": {
    "code": "gmbh",
    "name": "Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung",
    "abbreviation": "GmbH",
    "elf_code": "2HBR"
  },
  "register": {
    "court": { "code": "M1401", "name": "Amtsgericht Memmingen" },
    "type": "HRB",
    "number": "13557",
    "display": "Amtsgericht Memmingen HRB 13557",
    "country": "DE"
  },
  "address": {
    "street": "In der Paint 14",
    "postal_code": "87730",
    "city": "Bad Grönenbach",
    "state": "Bayern",
    "country": "DE",
    "formatted": "In der Paint 14, 87730 Bad Grönenbach",
    "coordinates": { "latitude": 47.87, "longitude": 10.25 }
  },
  "purpose": "Planung und Durchführung von Motorrad-Sicherheitstraining …",
  "capital": { "amount": "25000.00", "currency": "EUR" },
  "general_representation_rule": "Ist ein Geschäftsführer bestellt, so vertritt er allein.",
  "identifiers": { "euid": "DEM1401.HRB13557", "lei": null },
  "industries": [{ "system": "wz2025", "code": "85.53", "name": "Fahr- und Flugschulen", "level": 4 }],
  "incorporation_date": "2008-11-21",
  "termination_date": null,
  "last_register_entry_date": "2025-01-26",
  "counts": { "current_officers": 1, "documents": 4, "financial_statements": 15 }
}

The record is the register entry as it stands today. Officers, documents, statements, ownership and history are separate endpoints, which is why counts is here: it tells you whether calling one is worth a credit before you spend it.

`register`

The identity of the entry. display is the human-readable form you would quote to a lawyer. court.name is given as the register writes it (Amtsgericht Berlin (Charlottenburg)), which is not always the court's colloquial name; court.code is the official court code, stable across spellings, and is what you should match on.

number is a string, here and everywhere else. A register number is an identifier, not a quantity — it can carry letter suffixes, and leading zeros are meaningful.

`name`

The full legal name including the legal form. Former names are not in this object — they are in the register history, as company.name.changed events carrying what the entry replaced.

`status`

One of active, liquidation, terminated or unknown.

unknown means what it says: the register data does not tell us. It is not a synonym for inactive, and the field will never claim active for a company we cannot confirm is trading — for a KYC decision, a wrong active is the one answer you cannot absorb.

This was wrong in the old API

The retired /api derived this from a comparison that never matched, so nearly every company was reported active, including entries the register had deleted. v1 reads the stored value, and falls back to unknown rather than guessing.

`legal_form`

code is the value to branch on — gmbh, gmbh_co_kg, ug, ev and so on. name and abbreviation are for display, and elf_code is the ISO 20275 code where one applies.

The register stores this as free text with more than 20,000 distinct spellings, so legal_form is null for the 7.6% of companies whose wording we cannot classify confidently. A null is "we could not read it", never "it has no legal form".

`address`

The seat as registered, which is the address for service — not necessarily a trading address. formatted is the single-line form. Any component may be null; city is by far the most commonly populated.

`capital`

Registered share capital (Stammkapital / Grundkapital), in the currency stated in the register. The amount is a decimal string so it never loses precision in a JSON parser that reads numbers as floats. Pre-2002 entries can still be denominated in DEM. This is the capital the register records, which is not the same as equity, and is never updated by trading.

`incorporation_date`

The date the entry records as the company's founding. This is normally the date of the articles of association, which precedes the date the company was entered in the register — external sources showing the entry date will differ by days or weeks. Neither is wrong; they are different dates.

`counts`

How much related data exists: current officers, documents on file, financial statements. Counted from the record itself, so it costs nothing extra. A zero means there is nothing to fetch, which is worth checking before spending a credit on the sub-resource.

Officers are their own endpoint

Representatives, board members and authorised signatories are one collection at GET /companies/{company_id}/officers, because to a caller they are the same thing: a person or a company holding a role. That replaces the old split between representation and prokura_persons, and with it the register fields that used to hang off a person-shaped row when the officer was a company.

An empty list means "no extract parsed", not "nobody is in charge" — check whether address and purpose are also null before concluding anything.

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