Before you sign with a new customer, ship on account or extend payment terms, a quarter of an hour spent on the public record is time well spent. In Ireland most of what you need is public, and the parts that matter most are free.
1. Find the company on the CRO register
Start from the CRO number — the registration number the Companies Registration Office assigns a company when it is incorporated. It stays with the company for life and is not reissued after dissolution, which makes it the only reliable way to be sure you are looking at the right company years later. It is digits only, and it has no fixed width: numbers are issued in sequence, so an old company carries a short one. Quote it exactly as the register writes it — never pad it with leading zeros.
The CRO's own company search is free. It gives you the registered name, the number, the company type, the registered office and the status the register records — normal, strike-off listed, dissolved, or an entry noting liquidation, receivership or examinership. Read the status before anything else: a company listed for strike-off is a different conversation from a company trading normally.
If you have only a name, search on the name and then confirm the number. Similar names are common, and a group will often have several companies whose names differ by one word.
2. See who stands behind it
The register publishes a company's directors and secretary, and every appointment and resignation is a filing with a date on it. Two questions matter: whether the person negotiating with you has authority to bind the company, and whether the board has changed recently. A change on its own says nothing — a change immediately before a large transaction is worth asking about.
Ownership is a separate question and a harder one. Shareholdings are filed with the annual return, so they are on the record but only as of the last return. Ireland also keeps a Register of Beneficial Ownership, but general public access to it was withdrawn after the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled against open access to beneficial-ownership registers in 2022; access is now for designated persons, competent authorities and those who can show a legitimate interest. Do not expect to look a beneficial owner up the way you look a director up.
3. Read the annual return and the financial statements
Every company files an annual return — form B1 — with its financial statements attached. What you are reading is two things at once: the figures, and the filing behaviour.
The filing behaviour is often the more useful of the two. A return is due by reference to the company's own annual return date rather than one national deadline, so two companies filing on time can file months apart. Filing late is expensive in a way that shows on the record: it carries a penalty, and it costs the company its audit exemption for the following two years. A trading company with nothing filed for years is a question worth asking before you extend credit.
The figures come with a caveat that matters more in Ireland than in most places. A small or micro company may file abridged financial statements, which need not include a profit and loss account — so for a large part of the register turnover and profit are genuinely not published. That is absence, not zero, and anything presenting it as zero is misleading you. What you will still see is the balance sheet: assets, liabilities and, above all, equity. Negative equity means liabilities exceed assets.
4. Check the VAT number
If a supplier invoices you with VAT, they must be registered for it. An Irish VAT number is seven digits and a letter, sometimes with a second letter; written for a counterparty in another member state it takes an IE prefix. Validate it in the European Commission's VIES service, which answers for the whole EU and tells you whether the number is valid right now. An invalid number on an invoice can cost you the input VAT deduction.
A VAT number is not the CRO number in another guise, and neither can be derived from the other. Revenue issues it, the CRO does not.
5. Look for insolvency and strike-off
Ireland has no single free insolvency register for companies. What there is instead is the paper trail: the appointment of a liquidator, receiver or examiner is itself a filing with the CRO, and strike-off and restoration notices are published in the CRO's Gazette. That means insolvency shows up in the same place you were already looking — the company's filing history and its status — rather than in a separate lookup.
It also means the timing is imperfect. A petition presented this morning is not a filing yet. For a large exposure, the filing history tells you what has happened; it does not tell you what is about to.
What it adds up to
No single one of these is a decision. Together they give a picture clear enough to decide whether to ask for payment up front, shorten the terms, or simply go ahead. And all of them are public — you need nobody's permission to look.