The record costs less than the copy

In New Zealand you can see who runs a company and who owns it, in what proportions, and read every document it’s ever filed, without logging in and without paying a cent. Across the Tasman, Australia’s corporate regulator, ASIC, gives you the basics at no charge and asks A$10 for the extract that names a company’s directors and shareholders. One international records broker sells a record drawn from that same Australian register for US$49. It sells the New Zealand one, the one that’s free at the source, for US$19. Those prices were checked on 19 and 20 October 2026.

That’s the pattern almost everywhere. The official record is the cheap part. What people overpay for, and get misled by, is the copy.

Before I’d buy a company, sell my business to one, or sign anything that depends on one paying me, I’d want six answers. Most of them sit on a public register somewhere, for little or nothing. For most companies, the six checks take an hour or two. Skipping them is how people end up chasing a company that had been in liquidation for a month before anyone signed.

Six things to know before you deal

Does it exist, and is it active? Start with the official register in the country where it’s incorporated, and match the exact legal name and registration number to the contract in front of you. A trading name on a website tells you what the business calls itself. The register tells you who you’re actually contracting with.

Who runs it, and who owns it? The directors carry the duties and the shareholders carry the control. If the person across the table isn’t on either list, ask what authority they have to sign. Then search the directors’ names. Their other companies, and how those ended, will tell you more than a reference ever will.

Are its assets already pledged? In Australia, A$2 at the Personal Property Securities Register tells you whether a business’s equipment, stock, or vehicles already stand as security for somebody else’s loan (checked 19 October 2026). If you’re buying those assets, that registration has to be dealt with before completion. If you’re about to give the company credit, someone’s already ahead of you in the queue.

Is it in trouble? Insolvency notices and court records. A creditors’ meeting or a winding-up application won’t come up at the negotiating table unless you raise it, and the other side has every reason not to.

Is it sanctioned? Check the company and its owners against the official lists for every country that you, the company, and the money touch. Dealing with a sanctioned company can be an offence in itself, and money caught up in it can be frozen halfway through a deal.

What sits above it and beside it? Parent companies, related companies in other countries, offshore links. The entity named on the contract might be a thin subsidiary with a well-funded parent, or a well-presented company with nothing behind it at all. You want to know which before anyone agrees who signs and who stands behind the promise.

Where to look changes from country to country, and that’s where most people stall. Every country runs its own registers, in its own language, with its own fees and its own logins. The United States doesn’t have a national company register at all: each state runs its own, and what they publish varies a great deal. I’ve put the sources for all six checks, in 41 countries, in one place: the due diligence directory. Free sources come first, and every price on it carries the date it was checked.

If you are the seller here: the buyer will run these six on you, often before the first meeting, so run them yourself first. Look for the late annual return, the security interest from a loan you paid off years ago that nobody removed, and the director who left long ago and is still listed. Then run them on the buyer, because a buyer formed six weeks ago with no filed accounts is telling you something about how the deferred part of your price is going to be paid.

Where the copy lets you down

Between you and the official record sits an industry of copies: aggregators that pull registers into one search box, brokers that resell extracts, and data platforms that turn filings into charts. Some of them are very good, and I’d use several of them to find things. Two things go wrong when you rely on them.

Free isn’t always free for you. Two of the best-known free tools are free for some people and not for others. OpenCorporates, which draws on more than 140 registers, allows free use “for personal use only and not for the benefit of a corporation or company”. OpenSanctions, which gathers more than 470 sanctions and politically exposed persons lists, is free for non-commercial use only, and its own licensing page counts compliance screening as commercial. Both were read on 19 October 2026. Checking a company you’re about to buy, or about to sell to, is business use. Nobody’s going to stop you at the search box, which is exactly why it’s worth knowing before you build a process on one.

The copy can be wrong. North Data is one of the most useful company-data sites in Europe: look up a named company and you get a great deal for nothing. Its own premium page shows off what it does with a table under the caption “Example: Facebook Germany”. Read on 20 October 2026, that table gave total assets of £2.93B for 2024 and £2,972.6B for 2023. That’s a thousandfold swing in a year, in pounds, for a company that reports in euros. Further down the same page, the balance sheet for Facebook Germany GmbH says €540.6 million. In the table, every total assets figure carries an asterisk and the words “via LLM”, and the page’s own code labels the table Facebook UK Ltd. Under a Facebook Germany caption, the showcase shows a different company’s figures, in pounds, with four of its five years out by a factor of a thousand.

To be fair to North Data, its own terms warn that its data “may be partially or even largely erroneous”. That’s an honest warning, and it applies to every copy. If a platform that good can get its own showcase wrong, any copy can get your target wrong. The figure you’re going to act on, the one that goes into a price, a credit limit, or a decision to proceed, gets checked at the official source.

The register is the record. Everything else is a lead.

What the register won’t tell you

Public records tell you what a company has filed and what’s been filed against it. They don’t tell you whether the accounts are honest, whether the people who prepared them can be trusted, or how the staff will take to a new owner. That’s the rest of due diligence, and it happens inside the business.

The register is still where I’d start. It’s the one part of the picture the other side can’t polish for the meeting, and it’s the part that’s easiest to skip because it looks too simple to bother with.

Pick the next company you’re about to deal with, whether it’s a supplier, a customer you’re about to give credit to, or the business you’re thinking of buying, and run the six checks on it. Note what each one cost and how long it took. Most will cost less than lunch, and sooner or later one of them will be the reason you didn’t sign.

The six checks are on one page, with why each one counts and where to look, in Six checks before you deal with any company, anywhere, in the Download Vault.