Danish companies API: Meet Business Register of Denmark
Everything you need to know about the verification of Danish companies: the central business register CVR Virke as an excellent source of economic and financial information, a detailed list of the data we can find in it, types of businesses and the number of companies currently registered in Denmark.
Being a company data provider based primarily on official registration sources, such as business registers, we decided to present each of them in turn. In today’s article you will learn about the Danish CVR Virke, which is one of the most transparent commercial registers in Europe. It provides free of charge a lot of information useful in the process of verifying a B2B contractor. In the previous parts of the series, we wrote about Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, Norway, Poland and Slovakia.
Meet Denmark’s Central Business Register: CVR Virk
Denmark’s official trade register where Danish companies can be verified is the Central Business Register Det Centrale Virksomhedsregister whose popular short names are CVR or CVR Virk. It’s official website is HERE.
The CVR Virk contains detailed business information on all business entities from Denmark and also Greenland (as it is an autonomous territory of the Kingdom of Denmark) except personally owned businesses with an annual turnover of no more than 50 thousand Danish kroner. Interestingly, these companies are referred to in Denmark as the so-called hobby businesses (hobbyvirksomheder) — they do not need to be registered anywhere, they can not charge or deduct VAT, but withholding tax from their income is still compulsory. It is certainly an interesting form of promoting entrepreneurship, which at the same time shows the great trust of the government in the society.
It is also certainly worth mentioning that Denmark’s Business Register is one of the world’s most entrepreneur-friendly company registers. Denmark is famous for a minimum of paperwork and bureaucracy. You can register your own interest in CVR in as little as 15 minutes, completely online.
An exemplary company profile presented by CVR Virke looks as follows:
What types of businesses are in Denmark’s CVR?
In the Danish Business Register CVR, we find practically the same legal forms of companies that we encounter all over Europe.
The easiest way to identify the type of Danish company is by an abbreviation of its legal form, which is usually found next to the name of a given business. The abbreviations of the legal forms that you will most often encounter in Denmark’s CVR Virke are:
- S.m.b.a. — Limited liability company
- F.m.b.a. — Limited liability association
- A.m.b.a. — Limited liability cooperative society
- I/S — General partnership
- K/S — Limited partnership
- A/S — Limited company (joint-stock company)
- ApS — Private limited company
- IVS — Entrepreneurial limited company
Useful English-Danish business dictionary of companies legal forms
- Anpartsselskab — private limited company
- Aktieselskab — joint-stock company
- Enkeltmandsvirksomhed — sole proprietorship
- Filial af udenlandsk aktieselskab, kommanditakties — branch of foreign joint stock company, limited partnership
- Kommanditselskab — limited partnership
- Interessentskab — general partnership
- Personligt ejet mindre virksomhed — personally owned small business
- Iværksætterselskab — entrepreneurial limited company
- Forening — association
- Frivillig forening — non-profit organization
- Fonde og andre selvejende institutioner — foundations and other self-governing institutions
Denmark business registry search
All information provided by the CVR via Virk Denmark business registry search is, of course, originally written in Danish, and although the platform itself has a decent English language version, be prepared that some data will not be automatically translated.
In general, you can start a Denmark business registry search by entering the company name, its registration number, which is called in Denmark CVR nummer / CVR-nr (CVR number), P number (an identification number given to Danish production units), company address or entrepreneur’s name.
As we have already mentioned in our other articles, it is best to look for companies by their registration numbers — company names sometimes repeat and sometimes contain errors. In the case of the Danish register, an additional difficulty in finding entities may also be the very specificity of the Danish language — Å, even though sounds like AA, is not the same.
What kind of company information CVR Virke provides?
It is undoubtedly appreciated that the Central Business Register CVR Virke provides a wealth of free information on Danish companies. Basic registration data and numbers, data on board members and ownership structure, as well as financial statements of Danish companies — all of this is clearly and legibly presented.
Company information you can find in the Denmark’s Central Business Register CVR Virke:
- full name of company
- CVR number (Central Virksomhed (company) Registration number)
- address
- phone, fax, email
- start date
- dissolution date
- business type (legal form)
- business status (depending on the type of legal form of the Danish enterprise, it may have value ‘active’ or ‘normal’ if the company functions normally, is not at any stage of restructuring, liquidation or bankruptcy)
- business purpose description
- main type of business activity code and description
- company registered capital
- management and directors company information (role in company, name, address)
- ownership information & beneficial ownership information (with detailed information on percent of shares)
- list of related companies (also production units of the company)
- information on is the company a social or government enterprise
- number of employees
- financial statements and other certificates
Total number of companies in Denmark, 2021
Total number of legal entities registered in Denmark’s Business Register CVR Virke is over 2 million. As you may have guessed, most of them are historical companies — no longer existing. If we want to find out how many of enterprises actually work, we need to check not so much the number of business entities in the register, but also their business status — whether it has a value ‘active’ or ‘normal’. We did it on the basis of Danish companies data that aggregated from CVR Virke by our company information API.
So how many companies are actually in Denmark today? According to CVR, there are currently about half a million Danish companies that are actively operating on the market, as of January 2021.
See for yourself how this number is spread over the different types of Danish companies:
- 210,8 thousand limited liability companies
- 32 thousand joint-stock companies
- 0,1 thousand limited partnerships
- 1,1 thousand partnership companies
- 4,6 thousand foreign companies and branches od foreign enterprises
- 214,4 thousand sole proprietorships
- 27,3 thousand entrepreneurial companies
- 15,9 thousand personally owned small business
Denmark’s Companies API
Our Danish Companies API job is to send real-time data from the Central Business Register of Denmark CVR Virke, directly to clients' internal systems. As a result, employees of companies no longer have to spend additional time verifying the contractor, and the data software, whose task is, for example, calculating scoring, is powered by clean, reliable and up-to-date data.
The link to the full API documentation is HERE.
In turn, about the fact that it belongs to the Federation of Business Information Services FEBIS, we are ISO / IEC 27001 certified, and our solutions have already been trusted by many leading institutions, you can read on our Transparent Data website.
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