Tennessee Business Search

What the Tennessee business search shows

The Tennessee Business Entity Search finds a company by business name or Secretary of State control number. It finds a company by business name or Secretary of State control number. Use it to confirm a company exists and is active, not to get its federal number.

Tennessee's Secretary of State gives each corporation, LLC and limited partnership a nine-digit control number padded with leading zeros. Nine digits is also the length of an EIN, so the two get confused. The control number is the state's index and has nothing to do with the IRS.

The Tennessee SOS control number

The Tennessee Secretary of State, Division of Business and Charitable Organizations gives every company an SOS control number when it is formed, such as 000123456. It identifies the company in state records, and it is not the company’s EIN.

Check if a Tennessee LLC is active

Search the company in the Tennessee 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 good standing from the Tennessee Secretary of State, Division of Business and Charitable Organizations. Our LLC status check reads the status from public data where a state publishes it.

Good to know in Tennessee

• Tennessee is one of the few states that applies its franchise and excise taxes to LLCs, not only to corporations. A new Tennessee LLC has a Department of Revenue account to open on TNTAP from the date of formation, and the franchise tax has a minimum that is owed even in a year with no activity.
• The Tennessee Secretary of State assigns a nine-digit control number, zero-padded on the left, that the annual report and every certificate request require. It is printed on the filed articles and is the first thing the online annual report screen asks for.
• Tennessee LLC annual reports are due by the first day of the fourth month after the fiscal year closes, April 1 for almost everyone, and the state filing fee scales with the number of members. The Secretary of State's annual report is separate from the Department of Revenue's franchise and excise return, and the two have different deadlines.
• Most Tennessee businesses also need a business tax license from the county clerk, and from the city if it is inside city limits, for the state's gross receipts business tax. It is issued locally but the return is filed with the Department of Revenue, again under the EIN.

Questions

More for Tennessee companies

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