German Insolvency API — Insolvenzbekanntmachungen

German Insolvency Notices Monitor (Company / Regelinsolvenz)

Unofficial Apify actor that monitors official German company insolvency announcements (Insolvenzbekanntmachungen, published under §9 InsO) from neu.insolvenzbekanntmachungen.de. Not affiliated with or endorsed by any German authority. Data source attribution: neu.insolvenzbekanntmachungen.de (official announcements, §5 UrhG).

Example

Input

{
    "court": "München",
    "noticeType": "eroeffnung",
    "maxResults": 1
}

Output (one dataset item per company notice, trimmed)

{
    "companyName": "CL Capital Investments GmbH",
    "court": "München",
    "caseNumber": "1542 IN 1744/25",
    "noticeType": "Eröffnung",
    "noticeDate": "2026-06-12",
    "registeredAddress": "Hettstedt",
    "registerReference": "HRB 12345"
}

(Each item also carries sourceUrl, cachedAt and dataSource. Consumer / personal-debtor notices are never emitted — see below.)

Please read first

• What this is. This actor searches the official German insolvency portal by company name, insolvency court, publication-date range and notice type, and returns structured, company-only notices (court, case number, notice type, date, registered seat, register reference). It is a monitoring tool for counterparty, supplier and debtor risk.
• Unofficial tool — not affiliated with or endorsed by any German authority. The data comes from the official portal but this actor is an independent third-party tool. Notices may contain errors; verify against the source before relying on them.
• Public-data basis (§9 InsO) and robots.txt. Insolvency announcements are published to the public by statute under §9 InsO and are freely readable in a browser. The portal's robots.txt disallows the search path (it targets indexing crawlers of a session-bound JSF app, not statutory public-record lookups). The actor searches the portal, and it never evades rate limits or anti-bot measures.
• Company data only — no consumer / personal data (GDPR). Consumer (Verbraucher / "IK") notices and bare natural-person debtors are filtered out in code and never appear in the output; the Vorname (first-name) field is never searched and the free-text notice body is never fetched. If you process the output you become the data controller for it under the GDPR.
• Full legal basis. See ./COMPLIANCE.md for the complete Legitimate Interest Assessment (LIA) and design rules.

What it does

Searches the official portal by company name, insolvency court, publication date range, and notice type, and returns structured, company-only results. Use it to monitor counterparties, suppliers, and debtors for insolvency events (openings, dismissals for lack of assets, decisions in proceedings, …).

Company notices only — by design

This actor returns company / legal-entity insolvencies only. Consumer (Verbraucher / "IK") notices and bare natural-person debtors are filtered out in code and never appear in the output. The Vorname (first-name) search field is never used, and the free-text notice body is not fetched. See ./COMPLIANCE.md for the full design rule and Legitimate Interest Assessment.

Input

Field	Type	Default	Notes
companyName	string	—	Debtor name/keyword (Firma/Nachname). Optional.
court	string	—	Insolvency court name, e.g. "München". Optional.
dateFrom	string	14 days ago	Publication date from, YYYY-MM-DD.
dateTo	string	today	Publication date to, YYYY-MM-DD.
noticeType	enum	All	Eröffnung, Abweisung mangels Masse, … (Gegenstand).
maxResults	int	20	1–100.

The portal lists at most 1000 hits per search and refuses to list beyond that — keep date ranges tight for broad (no-name) queries.

Run outcome (SEARCH_STATUS)

Every run writes SEARCH_STATUS to its key-value store. All three outcomes end with the run SUCCEEDED, so automated jobs should branch on status:

status	Meaning
found	Notices returned (results > 0).
no_results	The portal answered; no company notice matched.
too_many_results	Over the portal's 1000-hit cap: nothing could be listed. Not "no notices" — narrow the search (date range, noticeType, company name) and run again.

{ "status": "too_many_results", "results": 0, "portalLimit": 1000, "fromCache": false,
  "query": { "companyName": null, "court": null, "dateFrom": "2026-07-01", "dateTo": "2026-10-27", "noticeType": null, "maxResults": 20 },
  "message": "Too many notices to return (portal limit 1000). …" }

Output (one dataset item per notice)

{
  "companyName": "CL Capital Investments GmbH",
  "court": "München",
  "caseNumber": "1542 IN 1744/25",
  "noticeType": "Eröffnung",
  "noticeDate": "2026-06-12",
  "registeredAddress": "Hettstedt",
  "registerReference": "HRB 12345",
  "sourceUrl": "https://neu.insolvenzbekanntmachungen.de/ap/suche.jsf",
  "cachedAt": "2026-06-12T20:00:00.000Z",
  "dataSource": "neu.insolvenzbekanntmachungen.de/ap"
}

No persons / personal-debtor fields are ever emitted. sourceUrl is the search page: individual notices are JSF postbacks with no stable GET URL.

Polite by construction

• 30 requests/hour hard limit (sliding window, persisted across runs).
• 12-hour cache — repeat queries cost zero HTTP requests.
• Audit log of every request, saved to the run's key-value store (AUDIT_LOG).
• No proxy rotation, captcha solving, or anti-bot evasion. If the portal signals automated access is unwelcome, the actor pauses rather than adapts.

robots.txt

The actor searches the portal. The data is publicly mandated by §9 InsO and freely accessible in a browser, and the portal's robots.txt disallows the search path only because it is aimed at indexing crawlers of a POST-only, session-bound JSF app — not at statutory public-record lookups. The actor never evades rate limits or anti-bot measures. (Until 0.1.13 a respectRobots option existed; it could only refuse the search, so it was removed. Old inputs that still send it run normally.) See ./TECHNICAL_SPEC.md and ./COMPLIANCE.md.

Pricing (pay-per-event)

This actor uses Apify's standard auto-charged events. Suggested prices, to be configured by the operator in the Apify Console → Monetization (not set here):

Event	Suggested price
apify-actor-start (auto, per run)	$0.005
apify-default-dataset-item (auto, per result)	$4.00 / 1000

A future deep-record event is reserved for fetching the full notice text but is not wired up (the notice body carries personal data and isn't needed).

Local development

export PATH="$HOME/node20/bin:$PATH"
npm install
npm test                                   # offline + edge-case + rate-limit tests
node test/run-local.mjs '{"court":"München","noticeType":"eroeffnung"}'

Support

• Questions, bug reports, data-subject requests: https://apify.com/pat1987/german-insolvency-notices-monitor/issues
• Operator contact: patrick.lierse@googlemail.com

Disclaimer

Unofficial tool. Insolvency data originates from the official portal and may contain errors; verify against the source before relying on it. Users who process the output assume their own controller responsibilities under GDPR.