What is free, and what costs a fee
ASIC keeps registers of Australian companies, registered Australian bodies, foreign companies operating in Australia and managed investment schemes, and anyone can search them.
Free to see
- Company or organisation name and type
- ABN, ACN, ARBN or ARSN
- Registration date and next review date
- Suburb, state and postcode of the registered office
- A list of documents lodged with ASIC
As listed on ASIC’s registers page.
Bought on the same page
- Company extracts, which contain details of the company’s officeholders
- Copies of publicly available documents the company has lodged
- Certified copies, posted, which carry an ASIC stamp and signature and “can be accepted as evidence in court”
Officeholder addresses are not available in the extract, a change ASIC made over privacy, safety and identity theft concerns.
| What you buy | Fee |
|---|---|
| Current company extract | $10 |
| Current and historical company extract | $20 |
| Roles and relationship extract | $23 |
| Copy of a lodged document, under 10 pages | $20 |
| Copy of a lodged document, 10 pages or more | $50 |
Registered bodies, foreign companies and managed investment schemes have their own extracts, and ASIC lists their fees, with certified copies and certificates of registration, on its company and organisation registers page.
Running the search
Under “Search ASIC Registers”, choose “Organisation & Business names” and enter a company or organisation name, a business name it holds, or its ACN, ARBN or ARSN. To find one lodged document by its number, choose “Documents” instead.
ASIC has also opened a refreshed company search as a public beta. It says that, for now, only free information is available there, and that paid company information will be added “later this calendar year”.
Watching a company after the first search
A single search shows the record on one day. ASIC’s company alert service is free, anyone can use it, and it emails you when a document is lodged against a company you have chosen to track. You choose the kinds of document to hear about. Among the groups ASIC lists:
- Internal administrationChanges of company name or type, a change of registered office, appointments and changes of officeholders, and changes to shares.
- DebtNotices that a company has been placed in any type of external administration, and appointments of external administrators.
- DeregistrationApplications to deregister a company or to restore one, and documents that change its status to “Strike off” or “Deregistered”.
- Disclosure noticesSignificant changes that could affect market value, such as changes in control or a suspension of listing on the ASX.
For a business that sells on account, the “Debt” group is the one this guide would expect most to watch: it is how news of an external administration arrives without anyone having to search again.
Published notices
ASIC also runs a separate publication website for notices that the Corporations Act 2001 and Corporations Regulations require to be published, among them notices about insolvency and external administration. Searching it needs no registration, and it holds notices published from 1 July 2012, when the website began.
People and organisations who are banned
ASIC’s view is that it is “a good idea” to check people and organisations before dealing with them. Its Banned & Disqualified search covers six registers at once, of people and organisations not allowed to manage a corporation, audit self-managed super funds, or work in financial services or credit.
For free it shows the name of whoever is banned, a person or an organisation, what kind of ban or disqualification applies, its start date, whether it is permanent or temporary, and the end date of a temporary one. Some people will not appear there, and ASIC names three other places to look: the Office of the Registrar of Indigenous Corporations’ register of disqualified officers, ASIC’s court enforceable undertakings register, and the ATO’s register of disqualified SMSF trustees.
The registers in bulk
ASIC publishes data from its business registers on data.gov.au, updated weekly, in formats such as XLSX and CSV and through an API. The registers include companies, business names, banned and disqualified persons and organisations, and several professional registers.
Read together with ABN Lookup, which says who a business is, these registers say how a company stands. Neither gives a way to reach its people, and the folio on emailing a business covers what the law expects once you find one.