How to test a company's age claim in five minutes with one register

"Serving customers since 1998." It is on the website, the van, and the bottom of the proposal, and it does real work: it implies survival, and survival implies competence. It is also the easiest claim in commerce to acquire without earning, and the registry is the cheapest place to test it.

This page is about claims that reference a year, what a register can and cannot say about them, and how an old date ends up attached to a new business through entirely lawful means.

What to take away

What the register can date

Formation. The date the entity was created on this register. It is a field carried through every system migration and is generally reliable even where the earliest documents are not. Formation is a state-level filing, the step the Small Business Administration's launch guidance treats as the ordinary start, and completing it takes a form and a fee.

Qualification. The date the entity registered to do business in a state other than its home state. Read as a formation date, it makes a long-established company look young, which is one of the two most common date errors in a check.

Filings. Every document in the filing history carries a filing date, and sometimes an effective date inside the document that differs from it. That set of dates is the entity's administrative life.

Status transitions. Administrative dissolution and reinstatement bracket a lapse. Read together, they date a period during which the entity was not current with the office, which the registration status vocabulary describes.

What the register cannot date

Trading. Revenue. Employees. Premises. Continuity of ownership or management, except through the roster on each periodic report. Whether anyone did anything at all in a given year. A register with an unbroken run of reports and a register belonging to a dormant shell that filed on time look identical.

Four honest ways an old date lands on a new business

A dormant entity is revived and renamed. Lawful, common, and the specific pattern worth noticing: a long gap, a reinstatement, a name change, a new agent, and a new address arriving close together, shortly before the company approached you. It gives a new venture an old formation date. It is not proof of anything, and it is a fair question to ask.

A registration is bought. Entities are transferable, and an entity survives a complete change of the people behind it, because the registration belongs to the legal person rather than to anyone attached to it.

A group reuses an old registration for a new operation. The entity is genuinely old and genuinely theirs. The business it now runs is new. Both statements are true, and only one of them is on the record.

The claim is about the brand, not the entity. A predecessor business, a partnership, or a sole trader may well have started in 1998 and later incorporated. Where a trading name has been used continuously, a trademark record may carry a claimed date of first use in commerce, which anyone can look for through the USPTO's trademark database search, remembering that the date there was asserted by the applicant rather than proved to a register.

Testing a year claim in five minutes

Writing the finding

The right-hand column is not an accusation. It is the sentence that survives being read back by somebody who was not there, which is the only standard that matters in a file.

When the year matters and when it does not

For a routine order, it does not.

Age is a weak signal, and testing it on a small purchase spends effort in the wrong place. It earns its time in three cases: an inbound approach offering unusually good terms, a credit or deposit request, and a contract whose value depends on the counterparty still existing in several years.

In those cases the age claim is often the only substantive thing said about the company's history, and it takes minutes to test. The wider sequence in company verification says which other checks belong alongside it.

Common questions

The formation date is old and the history starts ten years ago. Which is wrong?

Neither, usually. Registers digitized their records at different times, and a history that begins abruptly in a given year is often showing the office's system date rather than the company's. Ask the office what it holds for the earlier years.

Is a recent formation date a warning sign?

On its own, no. Every company was new once, and new entities are formed for perfectly ordinary reasons, including group restructuring. It becomes a question only when it contradicts what you were told.

They changed their name last year. Does the clock restart?

Not on most registers, because the name is a field and the number is the key. The entity continues, the formation date stands, and the change appears as a row in the history.

Can I rely on a date printed on a certificate?

Rely on it as evidence of what the office issued on the day it issued it. If the year matters to your decision, read the formation date off the office's own record as well and note both.