Data availability

We combine official sources and the web into one company profile:

Since August 2022, anyone can view the register for free, but company by company and mostly as a PDF. We turn it into structured data, link companies and people through unique IDs and deliver everything through one API.

What is in the register is set by law for each legal form. Who represents the company is always in it: managing directors or management board, owner or partners, and the representation rules. Any Prokura granted, the power of attorney entered in the register, is added. The most important differences:

You get the underlying papers as Documents: register extracts for every registered company, the shareholder list for GmbH and UG, the articles of association for corporations and cooperatives.

Corporations, the GmbH & Co. KG and cooperatives must publish their annual financial statements every year. How detailed they are depends on the size class (§§ 267, 267a HGB). A company belongs to a class if it does not exceed at least two of the three thresholds on two consecutive balance sheet dates.

This tells you what to expect:

• Total assets and equity are in every published balance sheet, whatever the size.
• Revenue and net income are published by medium-sized and large companies in their profit and loss statement. Medium-sized companies may combine revenue with other items into gross profit.
• Employees are stated in the notes by companies from the small size class upward.
• Consolidated financial statements are published in addition by larger parent companies. With financial_statement_type, you choose between individual and consolidated statements.

Our example request for Hetzner Online GmbH, Ansbach HRB 6089, shows this. In the example response, its Financial KPIs contain revenue, net income and employees from 2012 on. For 2008 to 2011 there were net income and employees, but no revenue, and for 2006 and 2007 only total assets. More on the fields in the Data catalog.

How current a detail is depends on when the company reports it and when it is published:

We look for newly published annual financial statements every day. Because of the twelve-month deadline, the latest statement still often covers the year before last.

With Realtime, the API fetches the Aktueller Abdruck (AD, current printout) live from the Handelsregister at the moment of your request. If that fails, you get the stored data. More in Current data and Realtime. You learn about new entries through Signals and Monitoring, see Monitor changes.

All register courts have kept the register electronically since 2007. The Chronologischer Abdruck (CD, chronological printout), the register extract with all entries, often goes back much further. It usually contains a company’s first registration, even if that was 100 years ago. But it does not always contain all former managing directors. In our example of Hetzner Online GmbH, the register history went back to October 2002.

Annual financial statements have been published electronically since the financial year 2006. The Financial KPIs go back that far as well, in the example of Hetzner Online GmbH also to 2006.

What history and validity look like in the response is described in History and validity.

Deleted and insolvent companies also remain available, with their history. The field status gives the register status:

For a deleted company, you still get the basic data, former people, notices and old annual financial statements. One example is the deleted blex GmbH, Ansbach HRB 5094. In our example request, it returned its annual financial statements from 2010 to 2012.

For insolvent companies, the feature insolvency_publications returns the insolvency notices, each with court, case number and date. In our example request for Lilium GmbH, München HRB 216921, there were nine.

Companies and people are connected through positions and shareholdings. The feature network shows these connections around a company across two levels. You see who runs it, who owns it and who it is connected to.

Each connection states its type: ROLE for a position such as managing director or Prokura, OWNERSHIP for a shareholding, partly with the share, and GROUP for affiliated companies. The details come from the register and the shareholder lists.

The network comes with Pro and Max. It costs 25 credits, but only if there are connections. The Person profile also returns it.

Besides the official sources, we analyze the web. The company profile therefore also contains details beyond the register.

AI Mode (ai_search=on-default) also finds companies that are in no register. It then analyzes publicly accessible data from the web and builds a company profile from it. You recognize such a profile by registration: null and by an entity_id that starts with AI_TMP_.

AI Mode also finds companies from fuzzy input and researches live on the web. The field purpose then contains a short summary of the business instead of the registered purpose.

These details come from the web:

• Contact data with website, phone and email in contact_data.
• Keywords as well as products and services in keywords and products_and_services.
• News through the feature news, with title, source, date and link. For small companies, there are often only a few matching reports.
• The content of the company website as Markdown through website_content, only together with AI Mode.

AI Mode researches contact data, keywords, and products and services. If a company was already fetched with AI Mode once, we also return these details without AI Mode, at no extra cost.