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, founding 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": "cmp_63b6n0c6p09pnsrr6nrtd0dzsc",
  "object": "company",
  "name": "Enduro Reise & Training GmbH",
  "status": "active",
  "legal_form": "gmbh",
  "register": {
    "court": { "code": "D2505", "name": "Amtsgericht Memmingen" },
    "type": "HRB",
    "number": "13557",
    "formatted": "Amtsgericht Memmingen HRB 13557",
    "country": "DE"
  },
  "address": {
    "street": "In der Paint 14",
    "postal_code": "87730",
    "city": "Bad Grönenbach",
    "state": "DE-BY",
    "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" },
  "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 }],
  "registration_date": null,
  "founding_date": "2008-11-21",
  "termination_date": null,
  "last_register_entry_date": "2025-01-26",
  "counts": { "current_roles": 1, "documents": 4, "financial_statements": 15 }
}

The record is the register entry as it stands today. Roles, 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. formatted is the one-line 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. GET /courts lists the court codes this API names, with the name the register uses. It is not every court the portal's form mapping includes.

`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, always lowercase. One rule derives it for the company record, search results, suggestions and filter hits, so a company has the same status in all of them.

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`

A plain value to branch on — gmbh, gmbh_co_kg, ug, ev and so on. The German name, the usual abbreviation (GmbH) and the ISO 20275 ELF code, where one applies, are in GET /legal-forms: free, the same for every caller, so read it once and look the value up.

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".

`industries`

WZ 2025 codes assigned from the registered business purpose. They are not register data. Each entry on a company is {system, code, name, level}. The classification itself — every code, its German title, its level and its parent — is GET /industries: free, the same for every caller.

`address`

The registered office as registered, which is the address for service — not necessarily a trading address. formatted is the single-line form, and state, when present, is the federal state as an ISO 3166-2 code (DE-BY). 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.

`registration_date` and `founding_date`

Two dates, and they are not the same:

registration_date is the day of the company's first register entry. It is null while it cannot be read for a company; GET /formations carries it for every new registration.
founding_date is the date of the founding contract (the articles of association), as the register extract states it. It usually precedes registration_date by days or weeks.

Neither is wrong. Use registration_date when you mean "since when does the register know this company", and founding_date when you mean "when was it founded".

`counts`

How much related data exists: current roles, 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.

Roles are their own endpoint

Managing directors, board members and authorised signatories are one list at GET /companies/{company_id}/roles, because to a caller they are the same thing: a person or a company holding a role. Each role names its holder as a party, so a role held by a company reads like one held by a person. Narrow the list with role_type, or add expand=roles to the company request for the first page inline.

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

On this page