Know the company but not its GST number? Type the business name below and pick the right registration from the matches. Legal name vs trade name — the difference that decides your search Every GST registration carries two names, and knowing which one you hold is half the battle. The legal name is the name on the PAN: for a company, the incorporated name (“Sunrise Retail Private Limited”); for a proprietorship, the owner’s own name (“Ramesh Kumar”). The trade name is what the business calls itself in the market — the signboard, the brand, the website (“Sunrise Supermart”). This is why searching “Sunrise Supermart” can return a result whose legal name is a person you have never heard of. Nothing is wrong: you have found a proprietorship, and the invoice should carry the GSTIN while either name may appear on the letterhead. Our results show both names side by side so you can connect them. If a mismatch still worries you — for instance during payment approval — run the specific GSTIN through GST verification and compare against the invoice. Getting better matches: practical tips Start with the distinctive part. “Meridian Polymers” beats “Meridian Polymers and Chemical Industries Private Limited”. Suffixes like Pvt Ltd, LLP and Enterprises add noise, and the registered form may abbreviate them differently than you expect. Try both names. If the brand name returns nothing, the entity may be registered under a very different legal name. Search any name you have seen on an invoice, agreement or cheque. Mind the spelling variants. Indian business names transliterate inconsistently — Laxmi/Lakshmi, Sri/Shri/Shree, Steels/Steel. If one spelling fails, try the alternatives before concluding the business is unregistered. Use partial words, not initials. “SRK Traders” registered as “S R K Traders” may not match your spacing. A partial search on “Traders” plus the city or state context is often the faster route.

Narrow by state. Common names return matches from all over India. The state code in each result’s GSTIN — its first two digits — tells you where that registration sits, so you can pick the Maharashtra one and ignore the rest. Decode any prefix with the GST state code list . One business, several results — which one do you want? A name search for a multi-state business returns one row per registration, because GST registration is state-wise. That is expected, not a duplicate-data problem: the same PAN sits inside every one of those GSTINs. If you need the complete picture of an entity’s registrations, the cleaner tool is GST search by PAN — pull the PAN out of any one result (characters 3–12 of the GSTIN, as shown in the GST number format guide ) and search that instead. Then confirm the specific registration you will transact with is Active using the GST number check . GST search by name FAQs Yes — that is exactly what this tool does. Type the name above and the search returns matching registrations with their GSTIN, legal name, trade name, state and status. The more distinctive the name fragment, the tighter the results. Three common reasons: the registered legal name differs from the brand you searched; the spelling varies (try transliteration variants); or the business is genuinely unregistered because it sits below the turnover threshold described in how to get a GST number . Try the trade name, the proprietor’s name and spelling variants before concluding. Probably not — you have found a sole proprietorship, where the legal name is the proprietor and your searched name is the trade name. Check that the trade name in the result matches what you searched, and verify the GSTIN itself before payment. Use the state code (first two digits of each GSTIN) to filter by location, then match the constitution of business and registration date against what you know. If you have the PAN from any document, switch to a PAN search — it is exact where name search is fuzzy. It is a discovery tool rather than a verification tool. Names are fuzzy; GSTINs are exact. Use name search to find the number, then treat the GSTIN lookup — with its checksum validation and live status — as the authoritative step.