BODACC Monitor — French Insolvencies, Company Formations and Business Sales

Every legal event in the life of a French business is published in the BODACC, the Bulletin officiel des annonces civiles et commerciales: a company is formed, its officers change, it is sold, a court opens insolvency proceedings against it, it files its accounts, it is struck off. The registries of the commercial courts send the notices, DILA publishes them, and nothing happens to a registered French company without appearing there.

This Actor queries the register live and returns the notices flattened into columns you can sort on.

50 704 155 notices, from 2 January 2008 to yesterday. 4 034 475 of them in the last twelve months, of which 206 852 were insolvency proceedings.

The problem this solves

The register is served as JSON, but six of its fields — the six that carry everything worth having — are not JSON objects. They are strings containing JSON. The SIREN, the legal form, the stated activity, the court ruling and its date, the sale price, the accounts year: all of it is locked inside listepersonnes, jugement, acte, depot, modificationsgenerales and listeetablissements as escaped text.

This Actor parses them and lifts the values into flat columns. A notice comes back as siren, legalForm, rulingType, rulingDate, salePrice — not as a wall of backslashes.

What an insolvency notice returns

A liquidation opened on 14 September 2026, published four days later:

Field	Value
companyName, siren	SMAG · 429982648
legalForm	Société à Responsabilité Limitée
activity	vente et distribution de produits de boulangerie, vente de matériel agroalimentaire
procedureType	openingLiquidation
rulingType	Jugement d'ouverture de liquidation judiciaire
rulingDate	2026-09-14
cessationOfPaymentsDate	2025-03-14
court, department	Tribunal Mixte de Commerce de Saint-Denis de la Réunion · 974
rulingDetail	the full ruling, naming the liquidator and the deadline for filing claims

cessationOfPaymentsDate is the date the court found the company had stopped paying its debts — the start of the période suspecte, during which transactions can be unwound. It is not a field in the register; it is written into the ruling text and pulled out here. On a 1 500-notice sample of liquidation openings, 1 256 mentioned it and all 1 256 parsed.

What a business sale returns

Field	Value
companyName → previousOwner	Learine ← HEPAB
salePrice, saleCurrency	140000.0 · EUR
saleCategory	Achat d'un fonds par une personne morale (insertion provisoire)
establishmentActivity	café bar restaurant
establishmentAddress	38 Rue Guy Moquet 92240 Malakoff
oppositionTerms	where creditors must object, and within how many days
deedDescription	the deed, its date and its registration reference

The price is not a field either. It is a sentence — "acquis par achat au prix stipulé de 140000.00 euros" — and the register writes the same number four different ways, 80000.00, 140000,00, 290302 and 1 000 000,00, in the same place. All four are normalised. On a run of 30 sales filtered to bakeries and restaurants, 30 of 30 carried a price.

What an accounts filing returns

companyName GOOGLE FRANCE, siren 443061841, filingType Comptes annuels et rapports, filingCloseDate 2025-12-31, filingYear 2025, published 31 August 2026. Where the company filed a confidentiality declaration under article L. 232-25, filingNote says so — which is how you find out the accounts exist but are not public.

The ten notice families

Pick them by name; the Actor maps them to the register's own codes. Counts are the whole register.

Input value	Register family	Notices
accountsFilings	Dépôts des comptes	26 405 507
amendments	Modifications diverses	8 521 563
companyFormations	Créations	6 585 407
deregistrations	Radiations	4 224 912
insolvency	Procédures collectives	3 336 372
salesAndTransfers	Ventes et cessions	891 516
registrations	Immatriculations	727 914
miscellaneous	Annonces diverses	4 963
conciliation	Procédures de conciliation	4 312
professionalRecovery	Procédures de rétablissement professionnel	1 281

A further 408 notices carry no usable family code and are returned under inconnue when no family filter is set.

Accounts filings are half the bulletin. A run with no family filter is mostly them.

Insolvency ruling types

The register does not expose the procedure as a field — it is a sentence inside the ruling. Ten readable types are offered: liquidation opened, receivership opened, safeguard opened, converted to liquidation, recovery plan approved, business sold as a going concern, plan failed, proceedings closed, director sanctioned, creditor claims filed.

The Actor narrows the query on the bulletin text and then checks the parsed ruling nature on every row, because the text filter also fires on rulings that merely mention the phrase. The summary row reports how many rows that check dropped: 7 of 200 on a creditor-claims run, 0 of 100 on an insolvency-openings run.

Watching specific companies

Put SIRENs in sirens, one per line. Spaces are ignored and a fourteen-digit SIRET is cut back to its SIREN, because the register stores both the spaced and the unspaced spelling and neither matches a SIRET.

A notice matches if the company appears in it in any role. Searching Orange's SIREN returns the sale in which Orange was the seller, with companyName on the buyer and allSirens listing both parties. Checked against companies whose registration you can verify yourself: 652014051 returns CARREFOUR at Massy, 443061841 returns GOOGLE FRANCE at 8 rue de Londres, 542107651 returns ENGIE.

Who uses this

Credit insurers and factoring companies watching their book for the first sign of a redressement judiciaire. Insolvency practitioners and restructuring lawyers tracking openings by court and by department. B2B sales teams working new company formations as a lead list. M&A and search funds pricing small businesses off the fonds de commerce sales that clear at 7 000 to 300 000 euros. Suppliers running a nightly check on their customer SIRENs. Data vendors and KYC platforms keeping a French company file current between INSEE refreshes.

Scope and limits

10 000 rows per query. The API refuses any request past that point for one set of filters. The Actor stops there rather than returning a quietly truncated set, and the summary row carries offsetLimitReached and a note saying how to split the work. A three-day window over accounts filings alone matched 21 781 notices and returned the first 10 000 in 64 seconds; narrowing by department or shortening the window gets the rest.

Working days only. The BODACC does not publish at weekends or on public holidays. A one-day window run on a Sunday legitimately returns nothing, and the summary row says so rather than leaving you wondering whether the run failed.

No PDF link. Every notice carries noticeUrl, the official BODACC page for it, plus bulletinSeries, bulletinIssue and noticeNumber — the three coordinates that identify the notice in the printed bulletin. A direct PDF URL is not published in the dataset and is not invented here.

Corrections are separate notices. A rectificatif or an annulation is its own record, carrying correctsIssue, correctsDate and correctsNoticeNumber pointing at what it fixes; it does not rewrite the original. If you are building an alert, set noticeTypes to initial notices only, otherwise a cancellation of a 2022 notice will land in today's batch — which is exactly what happened in testing.

A notice is a publication, not a state. Three notices about the same company on the same day are three rows: the conversion to liquidation, the plan de cession, and the resumption of proceedings are separate rulings. The register is a chronicle, and this Actor returns it as one.

Source and licence

DILA — Direction de l'information légale et administrative — through the Opendatasoft Explore v2.1 API at bodacc-datadila.opendatasoft.com, the same data DILA also publishes in bulk at echanges.dila.gouv.fr/OPENDATA/BODACC/. French public open data under the Licence Ouverte. Free, no key, queried live on every run.

Frequently asked

Why is siren sometimes missing? Because the notice concerns a party with no RCS registration — a sole trader registered only with the chambre de métiers, or an entity named in a court notice. Where an artisan number exists the Actor uses it, since it is the same nine digits.

Why does a field not appear on a row? Because that family of notice does not have it. An accounts filing has no ruling; an insolvency notice has no sale price. Empty fields are dropped rather than returned as blanks, so each row carries only what the notice actually said.

Can I filter by activity or sector? Use keywords. They are searched across the name, the stated activity, the ruling and the deed. Note that this search stems words, so boulangerie also matches boulanger. The family, department, SIREN, name and court filters are literal and do not stem.

How far back does it go? 2 January 2008. Leave publishedWithinDays blank to search the whole register, subject to the 10 000-row ceiling on any one query.

Is this the same as the company register? No. The RNE and INSEE tell you what a company is today. The BODACC tells you what happened to it, on the day it was published, with the court's own wording. For monitoring, the second is the one that has a date on it.