German Handelsregister Company Register Scraper

Look up any German company on the official Handelsregister (commercial register) — handelsregister.de, the government-run register operated for all German local courts (Amtsgerichte) — and get back its legal form, register court and number, registered seat, address, filing dates, and its publicly-registered representatives, prokuristen (holders of commercial power of attorney), and partners. No manual portal lookup, no account needed.

What it does

• Takes a list of company names (e.g. ["Siemens AG", "BASF SE"]).
• Searches the register's normal-search form for each name and collects up to maxResultsPerCompany matching register entries.
• For each match, optionally opens the official register extract ("Aktueller Abdruck") to pull the full detail: legal form, register court, filing/last-change dates, representatives, prokuristen, and partners.
• Pushes one dataset record per register entry found.

Input

Field	Type	Default	Notes
companyNames	array of strings	— (required)	Company names to search, e.g. "Siemens AG".
maxResultsPerCompany	integer	5	Cap on how many register entries to return per company name (1–50).
fetchOfficers	boolean	true	If true, opens each entry's register extract to fetch representatives/prokuristen/partners. If false, only the search-result row (name, city, register type/number) is returned — faster, thinner records.
proxyConfiguration	object	Apify RESIDENTIAL, country DE	Required for reliable access; leave on the default.

Output fields

Field	Description
search_query	The company name you searched for.
company_name	Registered company name.
legal_form	Legal form (e.g. "Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung").
register_court	Register court (Amtsgericht) that holds the entry.
register_type	Register type: HRA, HRB, GnR, PR, or VR.
register_number	Register number.
register_id	Combined type + number (e.g. "HRB 12345").
seat_city	Registered seat (city).
address	Business address (Geschäftsanschrift), when the extract was opened.
filing_date	Date of first entry (Tag der Eintragung).
last_change_date	Date of the most recent register change.
representatives	Publicly registered representatives (Vertretungsberechtigte).
prokuristen	Publicly registered holders of Prokura (commercial power of attorney).
partners	Registered partners/shareholders (Gesellschafter), where disclosed.
source_note	Whether the record came from the full register extract or the search row only.
scraped_at	UTC timestamp of the scrape.
parse_confidence	high (full extract parsed), medium (search row only), or low (no match).

Important — this data includes personal information, by law

The representatives and prokuristen fields name natural persons — the individuals a German company has publicly registered as legally entitled to act on its behalf (managing directors, holders of commercial power of attorney) — and, per standard German commercial-register practice, may also carry that person's city of residence and date of birth. This is not incidental leakage: German commercial law (Handelsgesetzbuch) requires every company to publicly disclose who may represent it, and the Handelsregister exists specifically to make that disclosure searchable by anyone, free of an account. It is the same legal category of public officer disclosure as the UK's Companies House officer records (already part of this fleet). This actor only surfaces what German law already mandates be public; it does not access anything gated, private, or authentication-walled.

Pricing

Pay-per-event (PPE): one charge per company register entry (company-record) delivered to the dataset. (No price has been set live yet — see the build report for the proposed figure.)

Notes on access

handelsregister.de is a stateful government web application (session + view-state based, not a bookmarkable search URL) — the actor drives a real browser through the site's own search flow (home page → search form → results), the same way a person would in their own browser. No CAPTCHA or bot-defense was observed on this portal.

Usage statistics

This Actor creates a small, content-free summary at the end of each run. It is used only to monitor reliability and improve this Actor. A copy is saved as USAGE_STATS in your own Apify key-value store, so you can see the exact record created for your run.

Set disableUsageStats to true in the input to opt out. Nothing is sent then; your USAGE_STATS record only says that statistics were disabled.

Only these fields are recorded:

• schema version, Actor name and build number;
• UTC start and finish hour (not a precise timestamp);
• run duration, number of results and time to the first result, each as a coarse range;
• whether the result was empty, the end status, and an error type from a fixed list;
• memory setting and counts of charged events;
• names of the input fields you set, never their values;
• the selected option for input fields that offer a fixed list of choices (for example a sort order).

We do not collect input text, search terms, URLs, domains, usernames, email addresses, names, proxy credentials, tokens, scraped records, output items, raw error messages, stack traces, or hashes of any of those values. Records are kept for no longer than 13 months, used only as aggregated operational statistics, and never sold or shared.

Additional fields (Phase 2)

This Actor also records your Apify user ID, whether Apify marks the account as paying, the size range of list inputs, the selected country when the input offers a fixed list of countries, and one category from a fixed Actor taxonomy. We use these fields only for aggregate reliability, repeat-use and cross-Actor analysis; reports suppress any cell with fewer than five distinct users.

The same disableUsageStats: true input flag turns these fields off too. The user ID is removed after 13 months; we do not export, sell, share, or attempt to re-identify this data.

Run-outcome signals (v2)

To learn whether a run did what it was asked to do, the record also holds a few more coarse ranges and yes/no flags. None of them contains content:

• the result limit you asked for (a range, when the input has one) and what share of it was delivered;
• results delivered per input item you listed (a range);
• output quality as ranges: how fully the result fields were filled, the share of rows that look like errors, the share of duplicate rows, and how many different fields appeared. These are counted in memory while results are saved; no result content is kept;
• how the run was started (console, API, schedule, webhook, another Actor);
• how it ended: stopped by you, timed out, reached the requested limit, stopped by the charge limit, and how many times the platform moved the run;
• if this Actor reports it: how many items to process worked or failed (ranges) and one failure reason from a fixed list;
• a short code made from the names of the input fields you set, never their values.

Repeat-run fingerprint (v2)

When your Apify user ID is recorded (see above), the record also holds an 8-character one-way code made from your input (proxy settings left out) and this Actor's name. It only lets us see that the same account ran the same input again soon after an unsatisfying run; we never see the input itself. It is stored only in the database, never published, and reports use it in aggregate with the same five-user minimum. It is the one exception to the statement above that no hashes are collected, and disableUsageStats: true turns it off.