What is Pre.Fill, and what does it return?

Pre.Fill resolves a person to the businesses they are registered with. You give it the name of an owner or officer, and it returns every Secretary of State registration across all states where that person is listed as an officer. It is the right tool to reduce friction during the application and collect only the applicant's own name and optionally a business name.

How to call it. GET /prefill/businesses takes:

• officer_name (required): the person’s name.

• business_name (optional): the business name the applicant gave you. It is not used to search; it is compared against each result so you can rank them.

• similarity_threshold: how closely the officer name must match, from 0 to 1. Higher is stricter.

• limit: the maximum number of registrations to return, up to 50.

What comes back. One entry per matching registration, with:

• Registration name, state, filing number, and issue date

• The registration’s primary address

• The officers listed on that registration

• Alternative names and DBAs on file

• similarity_score: how closely the officer name matched

• business_name_match: Exact, Similar, or No Match between the business name you passed and the registration name

A common pattern is to show the applicant the results as a short list, let them pick the right one, and prefill the legal name and registered address from it before running KYB.

Pre.Fill searches by person, not by business. To look up a business by a partial name, use Auto.Complete instead.