A public register is not a contact database

A public register exists so that anyone can establish who runs what business, in which legal form, under which number. That is its entire purpose: commerce needs a way to check who is actually on the other side of a contract. An entry says that a company of that name exists, in that legal form, with those activity codes and that registered address.

What an entry does not say is who answers the phone there, which inbox they read, or whether they want to hear your pitch. None of that is in the record. Because all of it travels under the same word — data — the distinction collapses even for people who have worked with registers for years.

In a product like this one, that distinction does all the work. A list assembled from entity entries answers the question “which company”. A list of e-mail addresses answers the question “who do I send this to”. Pursiva can only answer the first, and holds nothing from which the second could be assembled.

So this article does not tell you what you are allowed to do. It describes a constraint Pursiva placed on itself and draws the line where its responsibility ends and yours begins. It is not legal advice and it cites no provision.

• It reads entity entries. Legal form, activity codes, register status, the company register number, and the tax and statistical identifiers where an entry could be matched to that company with confidence — not to the accountancy firm or the agency that built its website. Those are facts about an entity, which is what the register is public for.
• It never reads natural-person entries. A search result marked as a natural person, or as such a person's local unit, is dropped before any detailed report is requested. Only legal entities are enriched, so a sole trader's entry never enters the database at all — including when that business would have been a perfect fit for your profile.
• It stores no individual. The schema has no column for a person's name, e-mail address or phone number on the target-company side. No plan unlocks one and no setting reveals one: there is nowhere in this database to put a person.
• It describes people only by role. A change on the management board is among the strongest signals there is, and the announcement it comes from almost always prints the name outright. What reaches the row is the role and the date — “the new finance director”, “the plant manager” — while the name stays in the source. The one exception is a family name written into the company's registered name, because that is how the register recorded it.
• It contacts nobody. Pursiva sends no message on your behalf, makes no call, and pushes you into no sending tool. A run ends at a list of companies with reasons and sources; after that there is only your decision and your channel.

A limited company's entry describes a legal construct. The company name is a company name, the registered address is an office, and the register number identifies an entity that exists regardless of who currently runs it. When that record lands in a database, a company lands in the database.

A sole trader's entry looks identical in a table and describes something else entirely. The business name is usually the person's own name. The place of business is very often the flat they live in. A record that presents itself as corporate is, in this case, a profile of one human being, home address included.

Whoever ingests those entries carries the consequences. A product built on a database of people has to answer, every day, what it did about its duties towards each of them; in Poland, companies that reused the public register of entrepreneurs have already spent years defending exactly that. Pursiva answers the question in the only way that needs no defence: there is no such database, and no switch that would create one.

There is a cost to this and it is not worth hiding. Sole traders are an enormous part of the Polish market and some of them would be good customers. They fall out of the list even when they fit. That is the price of a record that always describes an entity and never a person — and the product pays it rather than handing you a risk that only surfaces later.

A row is a company, a reason it fits, a reason to call now, and the source. The fit reason says what the company does, at what scale, and which part of your offer has a job to do there. The now reason points at a dated event — a new plant, a change on the management board, a job posting that gives away a project, a move into a new market. Each of those bullets points at a stored signal, and a signal you could not open at its source is never written in the first place.

That is enough for an opening line, which is the whole point. The difference between “hello, I have an offer” and “hello, I see you are opening a second plant, which is why I am calling” does not come from holding someone's address. It comes from knowing why you are calling.

The register number then does its work on your side, and for a seller crossing into Poland this is its most practical use: before you call, you have a way to confirm that this is the entity you mean rather than a similarly named company in the same group, and that it is still trading. How you get into a conversation without holding anyone's address is set out in the guide to working without contact data.

What sits in a company record, what sits in a signal record, and which of these rules are enforced by code rather than by intention are on the data page. That is the same boundary described from the schema rather than from the register — if you finish this piece still wondering whether some field turns up in the row, that is where the answer is.

Frequently asked questions

Can register data be used for sales outreach in Poland?

That is a question about your purpose and your channel rather than about the register, which is why it belongs to your own counsel and not to a list vendor. What we can say is what Pursiva does: it reads entity entries — legal form, activity codes, register number — to establish what a company does, and it never reads natural-person entries. That establishes which company fits. It is not permission to write to it.

Is this list GDPR-compliant?

A register being public is not in itself permission to reuse an entry for any purpose, so the answer splits in two and only one half is ours. Ours: the register is read on the entity side only, a sole trader's entry is never opened, and the result carries no field in which anyone's name, e-mail address or phone number could sit. Yours: who you approach, through which channel, and on what basis. No list vendor settles that half for you, and we do not pretend to either.

Do I get the company's register and tax numbers?

Yes, wherever a register entry could be matched to that company with confidence — the names have to agree, and a shared city is not enough. Where the match is doubtful the company stays on the list as unverified rather than carrying somebody else's number. What never comes with it is a person's name, e-mail address or phone number.

Read next

• You get no e-mail addresses and no phone numbers
• Data and compliance
• Start a run