Colombia Company Registry Scraper (RUES)

Official Colombian company data from the unified business and social registry maintained by the chambers of commerce: registration number, NIT, legal status, legal form, CIIU activity code, chamber of commerce and renewal status.

Free · No API key · Official source · Same schema across every country in this series

What data do you get?

Field	Description
companyName	Registered legal name
registrationNumber	NIT / registration number — the register's own identifier
taxNumber	VAT / tax identifier where published
status	Normalized to active / inactive / dissolved / unknown
statusRaw	The register's own wording, untranslated
legalForm	Legal form as registered
incorporatedOn / dissolvedOn	ISO dates
address, city, postalCode	Registered address
industry, industryCode	Activity classification where published
employees, capital	Where the register publishes them
officers[]	Directors / partners where published
sourceUrl	Link to the company's page on the register

Country-specific fields on top of the shared schema: identificationType, chamberOfCommerce, chamberCode, registrationCategory, lastRenewalYear, validUntil, lastUpdatedInRegister.

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
queries	array	—	NIT / identification numbers (830095213) or company names (Bancolombia).
maxResultsPerQuery	integer	5	For name searches, how many matching companies to return.
includeRaw	boolean	false	Attach the register's untouched response under raw.
requestDelayMs	integer	200	Politeness delay against a public register.
proxyConfiguration	object	none	Optional — datos.gov.co is a public open-data service.

{
  "queries": [
    "830095213",
    "Rappi"
  ],
  "maxResultsPerQuery": 5
}

Example output

{
  "country": "CO",
  "registry": "RUES (Registro Único Empresarial y Social)",
  "companyName": "ORGANIZACION TERPEL S A",
  "registrationNumber": "1143252",
  "taxNumber": "830095213",
  "status": "active",
  "statusRaw": "ACTIVA",
  "legalForm": "SOCIEDAD ANONIMA",
  "incorporatedOn": "2001-12-03",
  "industryCode": "4661",
  "chamberOfCommerce": "BOGOTA",
  "lastRenewalYear": "2026",
  "sourceUrl": "https://www.rues.org.co/"
}

What can you use it for?

• Dormancy detection — Colombian registrations must be renewed annually — a stale renewal year exposes businesses that are inactive in practice.
• Lead enrichment — NIT, legal form, CIIU activity and chamber of commerce from a name.

Frequently asked questions

Is this Colombian company registry scraper free?

The data source is free and needs no API key — you pay only for the Apify compute the run uses.

Do I need an API key or an account with the registry?

No. The chambers of commerce publish the RUES register as an open dataset on datos.gov.co.

Can I search by company name, or only by NIT / registration number?

Both. A NIT or identification number is an exact lookup; anything else runs a name search.

How current is the data?

Every run queries the source live, so results are as current as the register itself.

Can I export the results to CSV, Excel or JSON?

Yes. Apify datasets export to CSV, Excel, JSON, XML and HTML, and can be pulled through the API or pushed to your own storage.

Can I combine this with other countries in one dataset?

Yes — that is why it exists. Every actor in this series emits the same core schema, so results from different countries concatenate into one table with no remapping.

Is scraping this data legal?

This actor reads a public register that the Colombian authorities publish deliberately for public inspection. Company records are public by design; where a record names a person (a director, owner or partner), that is personal data and your use of it falls under GDPR or the local equivalent — handle it accordingly.

Why does the renewal year matter more than status?

A Colombian registration stays ACTIVA until it is formally cancelled, but it must be renewed every year. lastRenewalYear is the field that actually reveals whether the business is still trading.

Notes and limits

• lastRenewalYear is the field to watch. Colombian registrations must be renewed annually; a stale renewal year is a strong signal that a business is dormant even when status still reads ACTIVA.
• The dataset covers sole traders (CEDULA DE CIUDADANIA) as well as companies — identificationType tells them apart.
• Dates are stored as yyyymmdd strings with 99991231 as a no-end-date sentinel; this actor converts them to ISO dates and nulls the sentinel.
• Queries that match nothing are still pushed as { query, error }, so a partial run is never silent.

Other country registries in this series

Norway · Finland · Denmark · Iceland · Poland · Slovakia · Slovenia · Latvia · Estonia · Czechia · France · UK · Israel · Taiwan · Singapore · Vietnam · Brazil · Colombia · Peru · USA — plus EU VAT Validation (VIES) covering all 27 member states.