Japan Supplier & KYB Change Monitor

Monitor a fixed Japanese corporate-number watchlist against the National Tax Agency's daily difference file. Each matching event keeps the official process code, source page, file number, publication date, archive name, and retrieval time needed for an auditable supplier, KYB, or CRM review.

This is a change-monitoring Actor, not a static company database and not a legal registry. It is designed for teams that already know the 13-digit corporate numbers they need to watch and want a clean, daily signal for relevant registry changes.

Who it is for

• Supplier and procurement teams checking whether Japanese vendors were closed, merged, renamed, or moved.
• KYB and compliance operations keeping an existing Japanese entity watchlist current.
• CRM and master-data teams identifying official name or address changes before records drift.
• Investors, lenders, and M&A researchers monitoring a known portfolio, counterparty, or target list.

It does not resolve names to corporate numbers, enrich firmographics, issue legal opinions, send email itself, or retain comparison state. Schedule the Actor in Apify and connect the Dataset to your normal workflow or webhook destination if you need recurring delivery.

Why this instead of a company-data lookup

Many tools return a current Japanese company profile. This Actor reads one official daily change file once, performs an exact lookup against up to 10,000 supplied corporate numbers, and returns only newly published matching events. A zero-row result is therefore useful: no watched corporation appeared in the selected daily difference file.

The result preserves sequenceNumber; a daily source file can contain more than one history row for a corporation. It never guesses a change type from a name or address comparison.

Official source, attribution, and limits

The source of truth is the National Tax Agency Corporate Number Publication Site daily difference download. The site publishes ZIP-compressed Unicode XML files on business days, normally around 16:00 JST, and keeps a rolling set of files. Corporate numbers are public identifiers; each output row includes this source attribution:

Created by Japan Signal Lab based on the National Tax Agency Corporate Number Publication Site (https://www.houjin-bangou.nta.go.jp/download/sabun/index.html).

The NTA content is governed by its Terms of Use, including the requirement to cite the source and to state that content has been processed. This Actor does both in its output. It uses the download endpoint rather than the NTA Web API, so it does not require an NTA application ID.

The NTA publishes an OpenPGP signature beside its archives. This Actor does not verify that signature yet, and does not claim cryptographic verification. Treat outputs as operational monitoring signals and confirm material decisions against the official registry or other appropriate evidence.

Events

processCode is the unmodified official NTA process code. eventType is only a stable English projection:

Code	eventType	Official meaning
01	new	Corporate number newly assigned
11	name_changed	Name changed
12	domestic_address_changed	Domestic address changed
13	foreign_address_changed	Foreign address changed
21	closed	Registry record closed, including liquidation or merger dissolution
22	restored	Registry record restored
71	absorption_merger	Surviving corporation completed an absorption merger
72	absorption_merger_invalidated	Absorption merger invalidated
81	trade_name_registration_deleted	Trade-name registration deleted
99	deleted	Corporate-number designation/publication deleted

Unknown future NTA process codes remain visible as eventType: "unknown"; they are never silently recategorized.

Input

{
  "companyNumbers": ["0110005003755", "1300005008220"],
  "sourceDate": ""
}

• companyNumbers — required; one 13-digit Japanese corporate number per entry, with 1 to 10,000 unique values. Hyphens and spaces are accepted. Matching is exact after only that display normalization; company names are never fuzzy-matched.
• sourceDate — optional YYYY-MM-DD; selects a date among the files currently retained by the NTA. Omit it to use the newest available XML difference file.

For daily monitoring, leave sourceDate empty and create an Apify schedule after the NTA's normal publication time. To replay or audit a retained day, specify that file date explicitly.

Output

Each Dataset item is a matching official change event. Important fields include:

{
  "companyNumber": "0110005003755",
  "sequenceNumber": 12,
  "name": "Example Co., Ltd.",
  "eventType": "name_changed",
  "processCode": "11",
  "processLabel": "Name changed",
  "changeDate": "2026-08-25",
  "address": "東京都千代田区...",
  "source": {
    "provider": "National Tax Agency Corporate Number Publication Site",
    "sourcePageUrl": "https://www.houjin-bangou.nta.go.jp/download/sabun/index.html",
    "attribution": "Created by Japan Signal Lab based on the National Tax Agency Corporate Number Publication Site (https://www.houjin-bangou.nta.go.jp/download/sabun/index.html).",
    "publishedDate": "2026-08-25",
    "fileNo": 27873,
    "archiveName": "diff_20260825.zip",
    "retrievedAt": "2026-08-26T00:00:00.000Z"
  }
}

The SUMMARY record in the default key-value store reports the requested and processed unique-watchlist sizes, source provenance, source-row count, matching-row count, PPE charge counts/limit flags, and run duration. If a user sets a maximum run cost below the full request, processedWatchlistSize makes the partial result explicit. No result rows means no processed watched corporate number occurred in that file; it does not prove that no real-world change has happened.

Common workflows

Supplier closure and merger watch

Schedule a daily run after 16:00 JST with your supplier corporate-number list. Route Dataset rows with eventType closed, absorption_merger, or deleted to an internal review. Preserve the included process code and source fields with the case record.

KYB refresh

Run a counterparty watchlist daily or weekly. Use name_changed, domestic_address_changed, foreign_address_changed, and restored rows to queue your ordinary-KYB refresh process. This Actor reports the public-source event; it does not determine risk level or pass/fail status.

CRM master-data hygiene

Run your current customer or vendor corporate-number list on a schedule, then update only records represented by returned events. The exact 13-digit number remains the primary key even when the displayed name or address changes.

Store listing copy

Title
Japan Supplier & KYB Change Monitor

Short description
Detect official Japanese supplier and KYB changes from the NTA daily difference file—closures, mergers, name changes, and address changes—with source provenance in every result.

Search keywords
Japan corporate number, Japanese company monitoring, supplier monitoring, vendor risk, KYB, KYC, compliance operations, CRM data hygiene, merger detection, company closure, corporate registry, due diligence.

Positioning
For a known Japanese entity list, this is a daily, audit-ready change signal—not a general-purpose company database or a name search tool.

Pay per event pricing

Pricing is active in the Apify Store. The Actor verifies this event contract at runtime and stops before processing if the Console configuration differs, preventing an unconfigured or duplicate event from being billed.

Event	What is billed	Price
apify-actor-start	One Actor run (Apify synthetic event; charged automatically)	$0.005/run
monitored-corporate-number	Each corporate number actually processed from the supplied watchlist	$0.00020/company
nta-registry-change-event	Each matching official NTA change event written to the Dataset	$0.010/event

The Store price uses the three events above; apify-default-dataset-item is deliberately not configured because it would duplicate the per-change charge. The Actor uses the SDK's custom event name when writing a change result, and checks the user's maximum run cost before every billable unit. A deliberately low maximum produces a successful, transparently partial result rather than an over-limit charge.

For 22 scheduled runs per month, the price before matching events is about $0.55 for 100 companies, $4.51 for 1,000, and $44.11 for 10,000. Matching change events add $0.01 each. The Store currently includes platform usage in the PPE price. The Actor fixes memory at 256 MB to keep runtime bounded.

Live verification record

Verified on 2026-08-26 JST against the official difference file published for 2026-08-25 (NTA file number 27873, archive diff_20260825.zip). The archive downloaded, unzipped, and parsed into 2,222 source rows. Corporate number 1010001008916 produced one Dataset record for 旭化成パックス株式会社, official process 21, projected event closed.

The same input was also run in Apify Cloud successfully: one Dataset record, about 4 seconds elapsed, and a displayed run cost of $0.000. That display is rounded and is not evidence that production usage is free. Review real usage and Payouts data before making a future price change.

Unique monitored companies	Source rows	Matching rows	Local match + normalize time
1	2,222	1	3.027 ms
100	2,222	1	2.085 ms
1,000	2,222	1	2.054 ms
10,000	2,222	1	4.752 ms

These are prototype measurements, not a cloud capacity guarantee. The source archive is read once per run and limited to 32 MiB before ZIP processing; the selected XML member is limited to 64 MiB before it is parsed.

After adding the archive-size guard and output provenance field, the official 2026-08-25 file was rechecked on 2026-08-26 JST: file 27873 (diff_20260825.zip) downloaded, unzipped, and parsed to 2,222 rows in 511 ms; the one-row 1010001008916 closure match remained unchanged.

Development

npm ci
npm test
npm run build
npm audit --json

The production container builds TypeScript in a first stage, installs only production dependencies in the final stage, and runs dist/main.js. No API token, cookie, payment setting, or account identifier belongs in this repository.