Point-in-time reads

Every read takes an as_of date. The answer is what the register had published by that date — not what we know now, backdated.

Two timelines, kept apart

Valid time is when the world changed: the date a company was renamed, a director resigned, an address moved. Transaction time is when we found out, which is later and sometimes much later.

Audit work needs both. “What was true on 1 March” and “what could we have known on 1 March” are different questions, and answering the second with the first is how a reconstruction quietly becomes fiction.

# what the register says was true on that date
$ curl "…/v1/entities/ent_01JR8K3F5T2QW9?as_of=2019-01-01"

# what we had actually ingested by that date
$ curl "…/v1/entities/ent_01JR8K3F5T2QW9?as_of=2019-01-01&knowledge_as_of=2019-01-01"

What comes back

Each field carries the value current at that date, the filing that established it, and the date that filing was published. A field with no filing before your date comes back null with a reason, rather than silently carrying today's value backwards.

{
  "name": {
    "value": "Nordwind Spedition GmbH",
    "since": "2011-06-14",
    "source": "HRB 148902 · Amtsgericht Hamburg",
    "published": "2011-06-17"
  },
  "headcount": {
    "value": null,
    "reason": "no accounts filed before as_of"
  }
}

How far back it goes

• 2009 onward for register events in Tier 1 jurisdictions, on Team and above.
• 24 months on the Developer plan.
• Before 2009, we hold whatever the register itself has digitised, which varies from complete to nothing. The response tells you which.

The gaps, stated plainly

• A register that never published a fact has no history of it. Financial coverage in Tier 2 markets is 9%, so an as_of read for revenue in most US states returns null for every date, correctly.
• Retroactive corrections are stored as corrections. If a court amends a 2017 filing in 2024, the 2017 read changes only under knowledge_as_of today — under 2017 knowledge it still shows what was published then.
• Entities dissolved before 2009 may exist with a status and little else.