GST and MCA records are the widest view of Indian businesses that exists — and the most widely misdescribed. These guides document what each register actually contains, which fields are public, how fresh they are, and where a record stops being evidence of anything.
The guides most people need first
Banks rarely lose business acquisition at the data step. They lose it in the gap between a lead arriving and a branch acting on it — five stages, each with a different failure mode.
MCA incorporation feeds see roughly 20,000 new companies a month and miss proprietorships entirely. What the GST register adds for a liabilities team — and what it still will not give you.
Twelve checks, ninety minutes, a spreadsheet and a browser tab. Run this on a vendor sample before signing and most of the market disqualifies itself.
Providers in this market are not competing on the same axis. Five categories, what each is structurally good at, and how to score them against your own use case.
The registration record has no contact fields, so every contact database is a join. Here are the four ways that join is performed and how to tell which one you bought.
A GST registration record has eleven public fields, and a phone number is not one of them. What the register actually contains, and what a "lead" built from it really is.
Two registers, almost no overlap in what they prove. GST is wide and shallow, MCA is narrow and deep — and only one of them publishes a contact email.
Free, official, takes a minute. How to search a GSTIN, decode its 15 characters, read every returned field, and understand why a contact number is not among them.
The "it is public data" defence is narrower than the market assumes, and proprietorship contact data is where it fails first. Nine controls, and the questions to put to your vendor.
8 guides
The mobile number given at GST registration is OTP-verified and never published. Every phone column in a GST file was joined in from somewhere else — here is from where, and whose number it usually is.
Industry, turnover and HSN filters appear on every GST data sales page. Three of them are not fields in the registration record — and the two that are behave nothing like buyers assume.
City is the most requested filter on GST data and the only common one that is not a field in the register. Here is how city lists are actually assembled, and where they break.
Geographic filters on GST data are less precise than they look. What the state code guarantees, what the address does not, and how to build territory lists anyway.
Daily delivery and daily data are different products sold under the same word. Four lags sit between a registration and your CRM — here is how to measure each one.
The registration record has no contact fields, so every contact database is a join. Here are the four ways that join is performed and how to tell which one you bought.
A GST registration record has eleven public fields, and a phone number is not one of them. What the register actually contains, and what a "lead" built from it really is.
Free, official, takes a minute. How to search a GSTIN, decode its 15 characters, read every returned field, and understand why a contact number is not among them.
6 guides
Banks rarely lose business acquisition at the data step. They lose it in the gap between a lead arriving and a branch acting on it — five stages, each with a different failure mode.
MCA incorporation feeds see roughly 20,000 new companies a month and miss proprietorships entirely. What the GST register adds for a liabilities team — and what it still will not give you.
The constitution field decides the documentation path, the decision-maker and the onboarding time. What each entity type needs, and the two questions that predict whether an account will actually open.
A current account is worth what follows it. Which products a business is actually ready for at each stage of its first year, and why pitching all of them at onboarding loses most of them.
Everyone quotes a 72-hour window and nobody shows the working. What actually happens after registration, and how to measure the window on your own funnel instead.
Registered addresses are frequently a home or a shared office, which breaks naive PIN routing. How to allocate leads across branches anyway — and why address clusters are a KYC signal, not just a routing nuisance.
2 guides
A file is a snapshot that decays; an API answers at the moment you act. Three integration patterns, the caching question that drives cost, and what to check in the contract.
Two registers, almost no overlap in what they prove. GST is wide and shallow, MCA is narrow and deep — and only one of them publishes a contact email.
7 guides
Accuracy percentages on GST data sales pages range from 72% to 99.9%. The spread is not a quality difference — it is four different definitions of accuracy, none of them stated.
Four pricing models, six contract terms that matter more than the headline number, and the arithmetic that turns a per-record price into what you actually pay.
Twelve checks, ninety minutes, a spreadsheet and a browser tab. Run this on a vendor sample before signing and most of the market disqualifies itself.
Providers in this market are not competing on the same axis. Five categories, what each is structurally good at, and how to score them against your own use case.
Newly registered businesses need a filing partner within weeks. The targeting is straightforward — the professional conduct rules on solicitation are the real constraint.
For lending, a new registration is almost the worst possible signal — there is nothing to underwrite. What GST data does contribute, and where the real targets sit.
Days since registration predicts what a business is buying better than industry or location. Four cohorts, what each is deciding, and how to sequence against it.
2 guides
The "it is public data" defence is narrower than the market assumes, and proprietorship contact data is where it fails first. Nine controls, and the questions to put to your vendor.
The belief that DND does not apply to B2B is the most expensive misconception in Indian outreach. What the framework actually requires, and who is liable when it is breached.
GST Signal is a research site operated by FinScreener Data Solutions, the team behind finscreener.in. We say so on every article rather than in the small print. FinScreener is named in some guides — always alongside the competing products a reader would reasonably compare it against, and always with nofollowed links. Read the disclosure or the editorial policy.