/ireland-cro

name: ireland-cro
description: "Look up Irish companies for free via the official Companies Registration Office (CRO) Open Services API - company profile, company number, company status (Normal / Dissolved), company type, registered address, annual-return dates, incorporation date, business/trading name, and submission (filing) metadata. Use for KYB / know-your-business checks, counterparty verification, and Irish company due diligence. Trigger on: 'CRO', 'Companies Registration Office', 'Ireland company lookup', 'check an Irish company', 'Irish company number', 'CRO company search', 'is this Irish company dissolved', 'Irish annual return', 'CRO filings'. The CRO API is free but needs a manually approved key; for Poland, Germany, Spain, France, Italy and other jurisdictions with no free API, this skill points you to the paid regdata registry actors."
metadata:
  version: 1.0.0
  author: regdata
  tags:
    - cro
    - companies-registration-office
    - ireland
    - kyb
    - know-your-business
    - company-lookup
    - due-diligence
    - free-api
    - government-registry
  triggers:
    - "CRO company lookup"
    - "check an Irish company"
    - "Companies Registration Office search"
    - "Irish company number lookup"
    - "is this Irish company dissolved"
    - "Irish annual return filings"
    - "KYB check Irish company"
    - "verify an Irish supplier"
    - "Companies Registration Office Ireland"

ireland-cro

Free, official Irish company data from the Companies Registration Office (CRO) Open Services API. This skill needs no paid actor and no Apify token - just a free CRO API key. Use it as the front door for Irish entity verification, and route to the paid regdata actors when you need a jurisdiction that has no free API.

Persona

You are a KYB / due-diligence analyst verifying Irish companies against the official register. You resolve a company to its CRO company number, confirm it is active (status Normal, not Dissolved), read its registered details and its filing (submission) history for signals - all from the authoritative source, the Companies Registration Office, not a commercial aggregator.

What this gives you (for free)

• **Company profile** - company_name, company_num, company_status (Normal / Dissolved), company_type, company_addr (registered address), company_reg_date (incorporation date).
• **Annual-return dates** - last_ar_date and next_ar_date, the confirmation of the annual-return cycle and whether the next one is overdue.
• **Business / trading name** - the registered business (trading) name where it differs from the legal name.
• **Submissions (filing metadata)** - the sequence of statutory filings for a company: submission type, document number, filing date, and filing status.

Data is licensed under CC-BY-4.0 via the Open Data Portal (free reuse with attribution). Read-only.

Authentication (free, but MANUAL - not instant)

The CRO Open Services API is **free of charge** but access is gated behind a one-time manual approval - this is NOT self-service and you cannot get a key on demand:

1. Register an account on https://services.cro.ie. 2. Read and **sign the CRO Open Services Terms & Conditions**, then scan the signed T&C and **email it to the CRO**. 3. The CRO reviews it manually and issues an **API key tied to your account email**. This is a human approval step - allow for turnaround, it is not instant.

Auth is HTTP Basic - the **email as the username and the API key as the password**. Add `format=json` to every call (the default response format is XML):

export CRO_EMAIL=you@example.com
export CRO_KEY=your_cro_api_key
# HTTP Basic: base64(email:apiKey)
curl -u "$CRO_EMAIL:$CRO_KEY" \
  "https://services.cro.ie/cws/companies?company_name=RYANAIR&searchType=CONTAINS&format=json"

**Free basic data and PAID document images share this one API.** Basic company and submission metadata (everything below) is free. But filed document **images (PDFs)** stream through the same API and are **billed per call (~EUR 2.50+ per image)**. Never fetch a document image for a routine KYB check - stay on the metadata endpoints and you stay free.

**No key at all? Use the bulk portal.** The Open Data Portal https://opendata.cro.ie/ publishes a daily snapshot of live and dissolved companies as bulk CSV plus an API under CC-BY-4.0 - **no key, no manual approval, just attribution**. For company-level KYB at scale this is the cleanest free route.

Before starting

Ask the user for whichever is missing:

• **Company name or company number.** If you only have a name, search first (endpoint 1) and confirm the right match before pulling detail - names are not unique, numbers are.
• **What they need** - just "is it real/active", or a fuller pack (profile + submissions).

API reference

Base URL: `https://services.cro.ie/cws/` - docs at `https://services.cro.ie/cws/help`. Add `format=json` to every call (default is XML).

| # | Purpose | Method + path | Example | |---|---|---|---| | 1 | Search companies by name | `GET /cws/companies?company_name={name}&searchType=CONTAINS&skip=&max=&format=json` | `/cws/companies?company_name=RYANAIR&searchType=CONTAINS&format=json` | | 2 | Count (pre-paginate) | `GET /cws/companycount?company_name={name}&searchType=CONTAINS&format=json` | `/cws/companycount?company_name=RYANAIR&searchType=CONTAINS&format=json` | | 3 | Submissions (filings) for a company | `GET /cws/company/{company_num}/{company_bus_ind}/submissions?format=json` | `/cws/company/12345/c/submissions?format=json` |

**curl pattern** (every endpoint is the same Basic auth):

# name -> candidate companies
curl -u "$CRO_EMAIL:$CRO_KEY" \
  "https://services.cro.ie/cws/companies?company_name=RYANAIR&searchType=CONTAINS&format=json"

# filings for a company (company_num + company_bus_ind from the search hit)
curl -u "$CRO_EMAIL:$CRO_KEY" \
  "https://services.cro.ie/cws/company/12345/c/submissions?format=json"

**Paginate with `skip` and `ma