UK & Australia Company Registry Check API (KYB): ABN, ACN, ASIC, Companies House

Use this when you or your AI agent need to check that a UK or Australian company is real, active and in good standing, before you pay an invoice, onboard a supplier, sign a lease or add a lead. Give it a company name or a registration number. You get one clean JSON record per company, straight from the official registers, with plain-English red flags:

• 🇦🇺 Australia: ASIC company register (name, ACN, ABN, status such as registered, deregistered, external administration or strike-off in progress, company type and class, registration date, former names), plus with ABN Lookup: ABN status, GST registration date, entity type, state, postcode and trading names. Full reports add registered business names and ACNC charity status. Registered charities are found by ABN from the ACNC register even when they are not ASIC companies. Sole traders, trusts and partnerships are covered through ABN Lookup.
• 🇬🇧 United Kingdom: Companies House profile (status, incorporation date, SIC codes, registered office, overdue accounts or confirmation statement, insolvency history, previous names). Optionally current directors and persons with significant control (beneficial owners). Full reports add a disqualified-director check, charges (secured lending), recent filings and insolvency notices from The Gazette.
• 🚩 Red flags such as "status is liquidation", "accounts overdue", "ASIC status is external administration", "not registered for GST", "a current director matches the disqualified directors register" or "incorporated less than a year ago"
• 💸 From $0.003 per company. Queries with no match are free. No start fee

Official sources only. Companies House API (Crown copyright, free reuse), The Gazette (Open Government Licence v3), ASIC company and business-name registers and the ACNC charity register via data.gov.au (CC BY 3.0 AU), and the ABR's ABN Lookup web services. No scraping, no resold data.

What can I use it for?

• Invoice-fraud and supplier checks: is this ABN active and GST-registered before you pay a tax invoice?
• KYB / onboarding: confirm a customer's legal name, number, status and directors
• AI agents: "is Acme Pty Ltd still trading?", "who owns this UK company?"
• Lead qualification: company age, industry (SIC), size of business-name portfolio
• Pairing with our Website Legitimacy Check for the website side (domain age, SSL, look-alike domains, EU VAT)

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
query	string		One company name, UK company number, ABN or ACN
queries	array		Up to 2,000 names or numbers per run
country	auto / AU / GB	auto	ABN/ACN → Australia, 8-character numbers → UK, names → both
mode	profile / full	profile	Full adds officers, owners, disqualification, charges, filings and insolvency notices (UK), or business names and charity status (AU)
includeOfficers	boolean	false	UK directors and owners in profile mode (+$0.002)
maxResultsPerQuery	integer	1	For name searches, how many matches to return

{"queries": ["Atlassian", "53 102 443 916", "Tesco PLC"], "mode": "full"}

Output

Australian company (profile mode, ASIC open data only):

{
  "query": "Atlassian",
  "found": true,
  "country": "AU",
  "registry": "ASIC",
  "acn": "102443916",
  "abn": "53102443916",
  "name": "ATLASSIAN PTY LTD",
  "status": "registered",
  "statusCode": "REGD",
  "type": "Australian proprietary company",
  "class": "limited by shares",
  "registeredOn": "2002-10-08",
  "deregisteredOn": null,
  "ageYears": 24,
  "previousNames": ["ATLASSIAN SOFTWARE SYSTEMS PROPRIETARY LIMITED"],
  "abnDetails": null,
  "registryUrl": "https://abr.business.gov.au/ABN/View?abn=53102443916",
  "flags": [],
  "sources": ["ASIC company register via data.gov.au (CC BY 3.0 AU)"]
}

When ABN Lookup is enabled, abnDetails holds abnStatus, abnStatusFrom, entityType, gstRegisteredFrom, state, postcode and businessNames.

UK company (full mode, shortened; values are illustrative):

{
  "query": "00445790", "found": true, "country": "GB", "registry": "Companies House",
  "companyNumber": "00445790", "name": "TESCO PLC", "status": "active", "type": "plc",
  "incorporatedOn": "1947-11-27", "sicCodes": ["47110"],
  "registeredAddress": "Tesco House, Welwyn Garden City, AL7 1GA, United Kingdom",
  "accounts": {"lastMadeUpTo": "2026-02-28", "nextDue": "2027-08-31", "overdue": false},
  "confirmationStatement": {"nextDue": "2027-01-01", "overdue": false},
  "officers": [{"name": "MURPHY, Ken", "role": "director", "appointedOn": "2020-10-01", "nationality": "Irish"}],
  "significantControl": [],
  "disqualifiedDirectorMatches": [],
  "charges": {"total": 3, "outstanding": 1},
  "recentFilings": [{"date": "2026-06-01", "category": "accounts", "type": "AA"}],
  "gazetteInsolvencyNotices": [],
  "flags": []
}

No match: {"query": "Not A Real Co", "found": false, "error": "No Australian company found for \"Not A Real Co\". Not charged."}

Officer and owner records contain only what the register publishes for that purpose (name, role, appointment date, nationality, country of residence). Dates of birth are not returned.

Pricing

Event	Price	When
Company profile	$0.003	One company record returned (profile mode)
UK officers and owners	$0.002	Extra, in profile mode with includeOfficers
Due-diligence report	$0.005	One company in full mode (instead of the profile event)

Queries with no match, invalid ABNs and failed lookups are free. Set Maximum cost per run and the Actor stops cleanly at your limit.

Use it from an AI agent

Call it through the Apify MCP server with https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=poised_beardlichen/company-registry-check. A single check takes 2–6 seconds. For long lists, start a run with POST https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/poised_beardlichen~company-registry-check/runs, poll GET /v2/actor-runs/<runId>?waitForFinish=60, then read GET /v2/datasets/<defaultDatasetId>/items?clean=true.

FAQ

How fresh is the data? Companies House and ABN Lookup are queried live. The ASIC company, business-name and ACNC datasets on data.gov.au are refreshed by ASIC and the ACNC weekly, so a change in the last few days may not show yet; registryUrl links to the live register.

Does it cover sole traders and trusts in Australia? Yes, by ABN, through ABN Lookup. They are not in the ASIC company register.

Why didn't the disqualified-director check fire? It matches the director's full name and month and year of birth against the register, to avoid false alarms from common names. Treat a match as a lead to verify, not a verdict.

Is it a credit check? No. It reports what the public registers show. It does not include credit scores, court judgments or payment history.

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Support

A company that is missing or shown wrongly? Open an issue on the Issues tab with the name or number.