Registerbekanntmachungen

This Ruby Gem provides a simple scraper for the "Registerbekanntmachungen" (notices of changes in corporate directory) announced by the German Handelsregister on their page.

These Registerbekanntmachungen only contain officially mandated publications such as those mandated by Handelsgesetzbuch HGB §10. It does not contain all changes in the corporate directory, only those that are required to be published (in particular declarations to delete i.e. 'Löschungen' and 'Umwandlungen').

Since the data is static once published, small (only <= 200 announcements per day) and only the last 8 weeks are available at handelregister.de, this repository also hosts daily snapshots of the data sorted by month in the db directory. In most cases, running the scraper yourself it thus unnecessary.

https://github.com/bundesAPI/handelsregister provides a Python CLI for accessing the Handelsregister itself.

To use the gem, best clone this repository:

git clone https://github.com/coezbek/registerbekanntmachungen
cd registerbekanntmachungen
bundle

Run the scraper in verbose mode for announcements published today:

bundle exec lib/registerbekanntmachungen.rb -v

All available option:

$ bundle exec lib/registerbekanntmachungen.rb --help
Usage: registerbekanntmachungen [options]
    -v, --verbose                    Enable verbose/debug output
    -r, --reload                     Reload data and skip cache
        --no-save                    Do not save any data just print to stdout
        --start-date DATE            Start date in format DD.MM.YYYY or YYYY-MM-DD
        --end-date DATE              End date in format DD.MM.YYYY or YYYY-MM-DD
    -o, --oldest                     Download oldest available data not already saved
    -y, --yesterday                  Download yesterday's data
    -a, --all                        Download all data from the last 8 weeks
        --no-headless                Don't run browser in headless mode
    -h, --help                       Displays Help

Note:

• Data usually isn't published on weekends, but sometimes it is.
• If you run this tool in the morning you might want to use it again in the evening/night, because new announcements are published throughout the day.
• Data is only available for the last 8 weeks (7*8 = 56 days) on handelsregister.de. Use '-o' to obtain the data from the oldest available date.

The data contains the following fields for each announcement:

• date: The date the announcement was published as an ISO 8601 string, e.g. "2024-10-01".
• original_text: The original link text of the announcement.
• court: The court where the announcement was published, e.g. "Amtsgericht Berlin (Charlottenburg)".
• registernumber: The register number of the company including the prefix (e.g. "HRB 12345" or "VR 123").
• registerart: The type of the register, e.g. "HRA" for Handelsregister A or "VR" for Vereinsregister.
• company_name: The name of the company, can include special characters.
• type: The type of the announcement. Possible values I have observed so far:
  • Sonderregisterbekanntmachung OHNE Bezug zum elektr. Register
  • Löschungsankündigung
  • Sonstige Registerbekanntmachung
  • Registerbekanntmachung nach dem Umwandlungsgesetz
  • Einreichung neuer Dokumente
• state: The Federal State of Germany where the company is registered.
• company_seat: The city where the company is registered.
• former_court: In case the company registration was moved from another court, the name of the former court.
• details: The text detail message shown on the handelsregister.de website.

If an announcement is of type "Sonderregisterbekanntmachung OHNE Bezug zum elektr. Register", the available fields are different:

• date, state, court, company_name, type, details, original_text are equally available
• Instead of registernumber there is a sonderegister_referenz, which might be a registernumber but could be something else.

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/coezbek/registerbekanntmachungen.