ABR Search

The Australian Business Register (ABR) is a national register of business names, ABNs, ACNs and other publicly-available tax information. Its aim is to provide transparency and allow verification of businesses you engage in trade with. It provides forward and reverse look-up of business names and ABNs and makes it easy to determine whether there are any potential issues in relation to GST.

ContactsLaw integrates with the ABR and provides a dedicated business name search (Internet connectivity required). This search can be used at any time, but is most powerful when combined with contact creation, where it can be used to fetch details for an entity you may know very little about.

After selecting a search mode, the search term you type is sent to the ABR public web service. As the results are returned, you can elect to filter to a particular state or include less relevant (but broader matching) results.

The search returns basic/partial details for each entity (since details must be sent over the Internet), but you can drill down to discover more detail about any result.

Contact creation

When you click the 'Search ABR' button during contact creation (or if the search occurs automatically), the provisional entity name or ABN is used to pre-fill the search. Double-clicking on a search result populates the contact wizard with the details retrieved from the ABR. This may include the registered entity name, ABN/ACN, entity category and/or registered office address.

Depending on the information retrieved, you may need to complete some of the records yourself.