Georgia Business Search

What the Georgia business search shows

The Georgia Secretary of State business search finds a company by business name, control number, registered agent or officer name. The Corporations Division says it does not issue or maintain records of EINs.

The Georgia control number

The Georgia Secretary of State, Corporations Division gives every company a control number when it is formed. It identifies the company in state records, and it is not the company’s EIN.

Check if a Georgia LLC is active

Search the company in the Georgia business search and open its record. The status tells you whether the state counts the company as active. Words such as dissolved, revoked, forfeited, inactive or delinquent mean it is not in good standing, usually because an annual filing or fee was missed, and the company may need to be reinstated before it can do business there.

To prove a company is in good standing to a bank, a lender or another state, order a Certificate of Existence from the Georgia Secretary of State, Corporations Division. Our LLC status check reads the status from public data where a state publishes it.

Good to know in Georgia

• Georgia calls its yearly filing an annual registration rather than an annual report, and it is due at the start of April each year. Letting it lapse puts the company into administrative dissolution, which is a problem the EIN cannot fix.
• The Corporations Division issues a control number that identifies the company in Georgia records. Banks occasionally ask for it alongside the EIN, and the two are unrelated: the control number is a state index, the EIN is federal.
• Georgia routes state tax registration through the Georgia Tax Center, which asks for the EIN up front, so the federal number has to exist before the state accounts can be opened.
• Georgia's annual registration window runs from January 1 to April 1 each year, filed through the Secretary of State's eCorp portal against the control number, and Georgia lets a company pay up to three years of registrations at once. Missing the window adds a late fee and, eventually, administrative dissolution.
• Georgia does not require an LLC to publish a notice of formation. The newspaper publication rule that Georgia is known for applies to corporations, which must publish a notice of intent to incorporate, so LLC owners can ignore advice about running a notice.

Questions

More for Georgia companies

• Georgia EIN lookup: where a company’s federal number can be found.
• EIN for a Georgia business: what Georgia asks for after the EIN.
• LLC name check and LLC status check.
• Business search in other states.