--- title: "FAQ: coverage and sources" summary: "Nine questions on coverage: the registers behind the data, why France needs an extra column, what is missing in Germany and Delaware, how fresh a fact is, and the categories that are out of scope by design." canonical_url: https://entitybind.com/faq/coverage last_updated: 2026-10-15 copy: full --- # FAQ: coverage and sources > Nine questions on coverage: the registers behind the data, why France needs an extra column, what is missing in Germany and Delaware, how fresh a fact is, and the categories that are out of scope by design. Canonical page: https://entitybind.com/faq/coverage Last updated: 2026-10-15 ## Coverage and sources, answered in full. Written for the person who has to defend a company master to people who did not build it. Quote any of it. Which registers are wired and answering, which are built and silent, and which countries are simply absent. The gaps are named here rather than left for an integration to discover, because a coverage answer without its gaps is a sales answer. - 9: questions on this subject, each answered in full - 2: pages these answers are worked out on, all linked below - 74: questions across the whole FAQ Self-service. Create your workspace online and verify your email to start matching company records. Free starts with 300 credits and no card. Paid monthly plans are available in workspace Billing; VAT is added where applicable. Usage is tracked without automatic overage charges. [Trust and security](https://entitybind.com/trust) ## Everything we are asked about coverage, registers and the gaps Open the ones you need. Each answer is written to be read on its own, so a figure arrives with the population behind it — the fixture it was measured on and the rows it covers — and still holds when you paste it into an email. ### Which countries do you actually cover? Five registers carry measurements: the United Kingdom (Companies House, the baseline), the United States via Colorado and via SEC filers, France (SIRENE) and Norway (Brønnøysund). Combined three-region parity against the UK baseline measured 0.999955 against a pre-declared 0.9565 bar, at zero model spend, with no false binds in any register. Adapters for Finland, Czechia and Poland are wired but carry no evaluation fixtures, so they have no measured quality and we do not sell them as covered. Everything else in the source inventory is a planned build with a cost in engineer-days rather than a present capability. The claim is per register, never per continent. ### Do you cover Germany? No, and it is a hole rather than limited coverage. Germany has no lawful bulk source: the commercial register offers no API, no bulk product and no stable per-record URL, and its terms exclude reuse. Every commercial German workaround we found is a scraper inheriting those terms, which fails the bar this product sets for itself — a fact we cannot cite to something a third party can open is worse than no fact, because it reads as an answer. The EU High-Value Datasets regulation has required member states since June 2024 to publish basic company data openly, and that may change the position. Until enforcement does, the disposition is not to build, and the answer to a German file is no. ### Do you have US coverage? Scoped, and the scoping matters. There is no federal company register. SEC filers are wired through EDGAR, and at state level only Alaska, Colorado, Connecticut and Ohio publish bulk data free with no account; Colorado is the one with a measured fixture, at 2,191,009 extant legal persons and 97.76% name uniqueness. Delaware, the most important formation state in the country, sells no bulk product and no API at any price. There is also no quality claim for SEC filers yet: the wide digital tier measured lower there because closed-end fund families share near-identical names at one address. That is a finding about the register's shape rather than about the engine, which is why it is reported beside the combined figure instead of blended into it. ### Why does France need an extra column? Because a third of French companies share their exact name with another live company. The name-uniqueness census puts France at 67.96% against the United Kingdom's 99.53%: 1,003 live companies sit on one name. That is a property of the register rather than of the engine — no resolver can resolve a genuinely ambiguous bare name, and the answer there is the shortlist. Add a town or a postcode and it resolves: on the postcode tier, a French fixture measured 2,998 of 3,000. So a French file wants a postcode or commune column mapped, and if you do not have one, that is the finding rather than the failure. ### Where does the data come from? Public registers and cited web research, not a purchased corpus. Live and exercised today: UK Companies House including persons with significant control, SEC EDGAR submissions and XBRL, GLEIF's LEI records, Norway's Brønnøysund and France's SIRENE. The bar every source has to clear is verifiability at record level: a stable resolvable URL or documented API endpoint for the specific record, not a homepage, not a session-bound search form and not a bulk file the reader has to download and grep. Sources that fail it are recorded with reasons rather than quietly dropped. Where two sources disagree, the register of incorporation wins — and a live probe found a paid vendor placing HSBC in New Hampshire where Companies House had it in Canary Wharf. ### How often is the data refreshed? There is no cadence. Nothing revalidates on a schedule: a fact's `last_checked_at` advances only when a resolution happens to re-observe the same value, and a background revalidation job does not exist. What you get instead is the age, stated. Every fact carries when it was first seen, when it was last confirmed and how many times, the API exposes an age in days per field, and the entity reports the age of its stalest field rather than its freshest. A stale fact is served with its staleness visible, never silently refreshed and never silently withheld. If you need scheduled re-checking, that is a roadmap conversation rather than a feature. ### Do you have ownership or UBO data? Some, cited, and bounded. Ownership rides along from GLEIF Level 2 relationship records and the UK persons-with-significant-control register, with every edge carrying its basis and its certainty — because GLEIF's "parent" means accounting consolidation while a credit bureau's means majority legal ownership, and rendering both as one parent field is wrong in a way nobody can see. Traversal defaults to one hop and may be raised to ten, is cycle-safe, fails closed on ambiguous or name-only owners, and always populates what it did not walk, so you cannot infer depth from an empty field. It is bounded by LEI adoption, so an incomplete path is an absence of coverage rather than an absence of owners. ### Do you have company financials? For UK companies, headcount and balance sheet yes, revenue essentially no — and the reason is law rather than implementation. Only about 2% of the live UK register has to file a profit and loss account at all, and under 1% of filings in a sampled day carried a machine-readable turnover figure. Over 18,894 real filings, average employees reached 90.3% coverage and net assets 85.9%. Turnover for large issuers lives in ESEF instead, tagged on roughly 83% of regulated-market issuers. For a German GmbH, a French SARL or a US LLC there is no revenue, assets or profit available from any open source at any price. Quote headcount and balance sheet; treat revenue as a bonus. ### Do you screen for sanctions? No. Sanctions, adverse media and risk scoring are out of scope, and there is no risk boolean anywhere in the schema by design. A screening result is an assertion about a matcher rather than a fact about a company: false-positive rates of 90–99% are normal in production know-your-business screening, and writing one into a record as "sanctioned" would manufacture a defamatory fact with a citation attached. What a screening tool needs from us is the identity underneath it — which company this row actually is, with an evidence trail — so that its list matching runs against a resolved counterparty rather than a spelling. That is the layer we sell, beside a screening vendor rather than instead of one. When the answer depends on what your own rows look like, it has to be measured on your file. [Start free →](https://app.entitybind.com/app?signup=1) ## The pages behind these answers Each answer above is the short version. These pages carry the working: the tables, the payloads, the coverage rows and the caveats an answer can only point at. - [Coverage and sources](https://entitybind.com/coverage): Every register with its licence instrument and its readiness state. - [Reference data](https://entitybind.com/use-cases/reference-data): The LEI, company number, CIK and ticker crosswalk, and what it cites. ### Evidence basis Internal fixtures only. The historical 2026-08-29 per-tier recording covers 317 GB companies with identifier-rich arrivals seeding the catalogue first; the context tier includes country and registered-town prose. Its legacy replay has no full-prompt-verified calls and cannot certify current calibration. The September 5 CI reports cover 1,176 labelled pairs and 705 records over 250 companies using offline stubs. These are not independent customer holdouts or live production validation; the 99% minimum-input product target remains unmet. Scope is company and organisation identity only — not people, vessels, bank-account ownership, sanctions or emissions. Results may not be used for eligibility decisions about individuals, including employment, credit and tenancy. [Every figure, its population and what it does not show →](https://entitybind.com/accuracy) ## Built for one job. Wrong for several others. ### Built for Teams with a company master they have to defend — an MDM or stewardship queue, a CRM after a migration or a merger, a supplier file before a payment run, or counterparty onboarding that has to survive an audit. ### Wrong for Buying breadth as the product: we hold a fraction of an incumbent’s records and are not building a global company graph. Entity Bind resolves companies and organisations only. It does not resolve people, vessels, bank-account ownership, sanctions exposure, emissions or geolocation, and its results may not be used for eligibility decisions about individuals, including employment, credit and tenancy. ## 74 questions, in 8 groups Every question this site answers sits in one of these groups. If you are not sure which one covers yours, the index carries all 74 in a single page you can search in the browser. - [Entity resolution basics](https://entitybind.com/faq/basics) (9) - [Accuracy and evidence](https://entitybind.com/faq/accuracy) (12) - [The API](https://entitybind.com/faq/api) (11) - [The MCP server](https://entitybind.com/faq/mcp) (5) - [Pricing and credits](https://entitybind.com/faq/pricing) (8) - [Security and data protection](https://entitybind.com/faq/security) (9) - [Buying and engagement](https://entitybind.com/faq/buying) (11) [All 74 questions in one page →](https://entitybind.com/faq) Previous: [Pricing and credits](https://entitybind.com/faq/pricing) · Next: [Security and data protection](https://entitybind.com/faq/security) If none of these groups covers your question, send the file it is about — or write to hello@entitybind.com and we will answer it here. [Talk to us →](https://entitybind.com/contact) ## Start with your own company records. Every answer above is the general case. Create your Free workspace and inspect your own company CSV to see which rows match and which need review. Contact us for an assisted audit of existing matches. We write nothing to your systems. [Start free](https://app.entitybind.com/app?signup=1) · [Plans and prices](https://entitybind.com/pricing) 300 credits. No card. For a guided review of your file, explore [the Merge Safety Sprint](https://entitybind.com/audit-pack). --- This is the Markdown copy of https://entitybind.com/faq/coverage, assembled from the same data the page renders and carrying every sentence, table row, figure and question the page's main content carries. The HTML page is canonical; it adds the layout, the navigation and the interactive parts (the ask panel, the forms), which a copy can name but not run. Every page on the site, with a line on each: https://entitybind.com/llms.txt.