Businesses

What this page records

The unit of record here is a legal entity, meaning a limited liability company, corporation, limited partnership, or foreign equivalent. The question it answers is narrow and documentary: what entity existed, chartered in which jurisdiction, under what form, from when to when. Its sources are state and foreign corporate registries together with federal disclosure filings.

It does not record what a business attempted or how it ended. An entity and a venture are different objects, and the relationship between them runs in both directions. One venture can spawn several entities. One entity can sit above dozens of ventures. Many entities serve no venture at all, existing to hold a small managing interest in a sibling entity, which is ordinary practice in commercial real estate.

Why there is no total

This page does not publish a count of entities, and it will not publish one later. The figures in general circulation trace to a pleading that was never adjudicated as a count, and to press tallies of rows in a disclosure form. The form's own numbering cannot settle the question either: the form states that gaps in its reference sequence are due to the removal of items no longer reportable, which makes its highest reference number an upper bound on rows ever assigned rather than a census of entities present.

The word itself is unstable. A registered entity, an operating business, a branded venture, and a licensing shell are four different things, and counts of them differ by hundreds. Federal disclosures also capture only entities alive during a reporting period, so anything wound up before 2016 is invisible to them. A number assembled from these sources would look precise and mean very little, so the registry reports entities and leaves arithmetic to the reader.

How dates are recorded

Formation and dissolution are not single dates. An entity can be chartered in one state, authorized to do business in three others on three different dates, withdrawn from one of them years later, and cancelled in its home state later still. Each record therefore carries the chartering jurisdiction and formation date as its headline pair, with foreign registrations held separately rather than flattened into one span.

A dissolution date never appears without the basis for it. Delaware cancels a limited liability company for nonpayment of the annual franchise tax, which is a bookkeeping event and routinely reversed by reinstatement. Recording that as the end of a business would be a straightforward error, so the basis is a required field wherever a status appears. Where a status sits behind a paid lookup and has not been obtained, the record says so rather than leaving a blank a reader might mistake for active.

The registry