Austria (AT)

Overview

Austria maintains a centralized commercial register system called the Firmenbuch, administered by the Austrian courts. It provides comprehensive information on all registered companies, partnerships, and other legal entities in the country.

Registers

Austria's company data lives in three separate registers, each numbering its entities in a shape the others cannot produce.

Firmenbuch

The commercial register, maintained by the Austrian courts. It holds every registered company, partnership and other legal entity, with structured company data and official documents.

GISA

The Gewerbeinformationssystem Austria, the trade-licence register. It holds trade licences and the people who answer for them — a different population and a different question from the Firmenbuch.

Vereinsregister (ZVR)

The Zentrales Vereinsregister, the Federal Ministry of the Interior's register of associations (Vereine). It is a separate population from the Firmenbuch: an association is in the ZVR precisely because it is not a commercial entity, so a ZVR-Zahl and a Firmenbuchnummer never describe the same body.

An association must carry its ZVR-Zahl on its own correspondence and website imprint, so in practice a counterparty's number is easy to obtain — and, as the searching section below explains, it is by far the most reliable way to reach one.

Identifiers

Austrian companies are uniquely identified by their Firmenbuchnummer (FN), which is unique across all courts. Two further Austrian registers number their entities in shapes that cannot be confused with an FN or with each other, so a number sent as companyNumber reaches the register that issued it without you having to name it:

Associations are not in the Firmenbuch. See Searching for a Verein below — that register answers one association at a time and never returns a list.

Legal Forms

Corporations

Partnerships

Other

Legal representative roles

Every person on an Austrian company report carries a Firmenbuch function code. The register publishes the role in German only, so each role is returned three ways:

Trade-licence roles (GISA)

A report sourced from GISA, the trade-licence register, carries one further role that has no Firmenbuch code:

Searching by register number

A register number identifies one entity outright, so it is always the most reliable query. For an association it is the only query that cannot be defeated by an ambiguous name:

curl -X POST "https://api.kausate.com/v2/companies/search" \
  -H "X-API-Key: $KAUSATE_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"companyNumber": "730335108", "jurisdictionCode": "at"}'

companyNumber takes any of Austria's three register numbers: a Firmenbuchnummer, a GISA-Zahl or a ZVR-Zahl. They cannot be confused with one another — a Firmenbuchnummer ends in a check letter, a GISA-Zahl is exactly 8 digits, a ZVR-Zahl is 9 or 10 — so the number is sent to the register that issued it without you having to say which. A number typed into companyName is routed the same way.

Prefixes and spacing are accepted: ZVR 730 335 108, ZVR-Zahl: 730335108 and 730335108 are the same query.

Advanced search

Use advancedQuery to state explicitly which register you mean, or to narrow a name to one seat.

{
  "advancedQuery": {
    "zvrNumber": "730335108",
    "jurisdiction": "at"
  }
}

Available fields

vereinssitz is a narrower, not a search criterion: supply it together with name. It is a plain place name — you do not need the register's internal seat key.

{
  "advancedQuery": {
    "name": "Alpenverein Edelweiss",
    "vereinssitz": "Wien",
    "jurisdiction": "at"
  }
}

Searching for a Verein

Searching by name: one result, or none

A name search matches on the beginning of the registered name, and answers only when that beginning belongs to a single association. Three rules follow:

Worked through a real example:

So: lengthen the name until it can only mean one association. Each further word narrows the set; the first query that leaves exactly one association is the one that answers.

curl -X POST "https://api.kausate.com/v2/companies/search" \
  -H "X-API-Key: $KAUSATE_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "companyName": "Naturfreunde Österreich, Landesorganisation Wien",
    "jurisdictionCode": "at"
  }'

A plain companyName searches the Firmenbuch and the ZVR together and returns both — you do not have to know in advance whether the entity you are looking for is a company or an association.

When a name cannot work

An umbrella association whose branches extend its name cannot be found by name at all — no prefix that matches it is ever unique. Naturfreunde Österreich (ZVR 665376741) is exactly this case: its own regional organisations carry longer names built on it, so every prefix that reaches the federal body also reaches them.

For those, use the ZVR-Zahl. Narrowing by seat does not help — the federal body and its Vienna branch are both seated in Vienna.

What an empty result means

For a company register, "no results" usually means "not registered". Here it does not. The ZVR returns the same answer for an association that is dissolved, one whose number is unknown, one covered by an information block (Auskunftssperre, § 17 Abs 3 VerG), and a name that matches more than one association — and it is not permitted to tell the caller which of those applies.

Treat an empty result as "the register would not answer this query", and retry with a longer name or the ZVR-Zahl before concluding that an association does not exist.

What the register holds

Officer roles

Associations name their offices in their own statutes, so the register prints whatever those say — Präsident, Schriftführer-Stv., weiteres Mitglied des Landesdirektoriums. There is no code list. Each officer is returned with the register's own German wording in role.original alongside a normalized, cross-jurisdiction role.normalized; where an office is specific to one association, role.normalized stays Other rather than guessing at a neighbouring role.

Other data sources

These further sources also feed Kausate responses for this jurisdiction:

Company data in every jurisdiction is also spread across sources outside the commercial register — the central bank, the official gazette, the financial supervisor's authorisation registers, the statistical office and the tax authority among them. Kausate draws only on the sources described on this page; when you need something the API does not carry, those are where to look.

Coverage

• All 9 federal states (Bundesländer) covered
• All company types registered in the Firmenbuch
• Historical data available