How to check a client before you take the work

A client offers you a project. The brief is clear, the fee is decent, and they want you to start on Monday. Payment is thirty days after delivery, or forty-five, or “as soon as the invoice clears finance”.

Read that last part again, because it is the whole deal. You will do the work first and be paid later. For those weeks you are an unsecured lender to a company you have not met, at zero interest, on a term the client set, secured by nothing but an email thread. Nobody calls it lending, and that is exactly why it goes unpriced.

The register will not tell you whether you will be paid. It will tell you who you are dealing with, whether they file anything on time, and how much history there is to read. And there is one register in this exercise that matters more than any of that, because it is the only one you control. It is your own.

Start with the entity, not the brand

The name on the brief is often not the name on the register. Agencies trade under one name and invoice under another, and a group can run four companies with one website between them.

Get the legal name and the CIN from the person engaging you, before the proposal, and confirm they match. Asking is normal and takes one message. The two-minute check on whether a company is real walks the free fields end to end, so this post assumes you have done it and looks only at what a freelancer should read differently.

Put the CIN on your own invoice too. It removes any argument later about which entity in a group you contracted with.

The three register fields that actually matter to you

MCA publishes these on its own master-data view. Our free lookup covers the legal name, CIN, status, incorporation date and state; the rest of what follows sits in the filings.

How current the filings are. The register shows the date of the last annual general meeting and the date of the last balance sheet on record. That second date is the balance sheet’s own as-at date, not the day it was filed, which matters when you are reading it for currency. You are not auditing anything: you are asking whether this company does its paperwork, because your invoice will be handled by the same function that files it. A gap is not automatically a red flag, though, because a young company may have nothing due yet, and the next field is where that gets decided.

How old the company is. This is worth more than it looks, because of how much of the register is new. In our snapshot of the company master taken on 8 September 2026, 3,88,117 of the 21,00,421 dated Active companies were incorporated in the previous two years, or 18.48%. Almost one prospective client in five has at most one year of accounts on the register, and often none. (Those counts exclude LLPs, which make up another 4.94 lakh Active entities and file on a different calendar entirely.)

The newest cohort is the one to watch. 2,88,908 Active companies, about one in seven, were incorporated on or after 1 April 2025, and their first accounts are not yet due. Section 96 gives a company nine months from the close of its first financial year to hold its first annual general meeting, and section 137 thirty days after that to file. So a company incorporated in the middle of last year can have a completely empty filing history and be in no default at all. Reading that as neglect is the commonest mistake made with this data, and when a missing year is genuinely missing rather than simply not yet due works the arithmetic through.

Treat 18.48% as a floor. The newest registration in that snapshot is dated 2 June 2026, so a little over three months of the window is missing from the data entirely, and the real share is higher.

What follows is practical. On close to one client in five, the free checks are all the evidence you are ever going to get, because there is nothing else filed yet. The answer to that is not to check harder. It is to structure the engagement differently, and to get the one lever you control in place before you start.

Paid-up capital. Read it as how much was ever put in, not as money available. It is useful mainly for the mismatch: ₹1 lakh of paid-up capital commissioning ₹15 lakh of work is not necessarily a problem, but it is a question to hold in mind while you set terms.

The register almost nobody checks is your own

Here is the part that competitors writing about client checks leave out entirely. If you are a micro or small enterprise, sections 15 and 16 of the MSMED Act 2006 give you a payment right that cannot be contracted away: forty-five days is a ceiling on what can be agreed rather than a grace period, and interest on delay runs at three times the RBI bank rate with monthly rests. Those provisions are worked through in giving a new customer credit for the first time, which is the version of this situation for someone supplying goods and sizing a credit line. A freelancer has one fee and one invoice.

The question this post cares about is the one before that: are you a registered micro enterprise at all, and were you one before you invoiced?

Three things make the answer easier than most freelancers assume.

Services are in, and you are not near the boundary. Since 1 April 2025 a micro enterprise is one with investment up to ₹2.5 crore and turnover up to ₹10 crore, under notification S.O. 1364(E) of 21 March 2025. A freelancer is not close to that line, they are orders of magnitude inside it. Ordinary freelance and consulting activities are registrable, and the classification is not the risk here.

A sole proprietor needs no GST registration. The original Udyam rules would have made a GSTIN mandatory, which would have excluded every freelancer below the GST threshold. Notification S.O. 1055(E) of 5 March 2021 fixed that. It inserted, word for word:

In case of any proprietorship enterprise not registered under any Act or rules of the Central Government or the State Government, the proprietor may use his or her PAN for registration of the enterprise in the Udyam Registration portal and for all other types of enterprises PAN shall be mandatory.

and made the GSTIN requirement follow the CGST Act’s own applicability. So an unregistered sole proprietor registers with their own Aadhaar and their own PAN. Note the second half: if you have put your freelancing into a company, the PAN is the company’s and is mandatory.

It is free, and people are charged for it anyway. The portal states its own position bluntly on the Udyam portal: “Registration Process is totally free. No Costs or Fees are to be paid to anyone.” If an agent quotes you a fee to obtain an Udyam registration, that is the entire basis on which to decline.

Now the part that actually decides whether any of this helps you. The delayed-payment machinery is only open to an enterprise that was registered before the invoice it is complaining about. The MSME Samadhaan portal’s FAQ says registration is mandatory for the delayed-payment provisions, and that because the benefits cannot be taken retrospectively, “prior registration of the enterprise before the date of disputed invoice is mandatory for filing an application”. This is not guidance the portal offers. It blocks the application.

Register on the day you decide to freelance. Not on the day a client goes quiet, because by then it is too late to matter.

One more thing from the same FAQ, and it is muddled in a way worth knowing. One answer says a work order is compulsory, with an affidavit where the order was oral. Another says it is not strictly necessary and that invoice acknowledgements, delivery challans, part payment or email will do. The portal notes the FAQ is illustrative only. Which is the practical argument for getting scope and fee in writing: do not be the enterprise discovering which answer your council follows.

The reason to care about all of this is that a registered supplier becomes visible in the client’s own paperwork. A company that owes a registered micro or small supplier past forty-five days has to name it, twice a year, in the half-yearly return where a buyer says what it owes you.

When it is worth buying the filings

MCA’s own fee for a company’s public documents is ₹100, and it buys a seven-day download window. Through Entiva it is ₹149 for a company, which includes that registry fee, charged per company rather than per document. Either way the question is not a rupee threshold, it is the shape of the engagement.

It is not worth it for a small fixed project paid in advance or on delivery. It starts being worth it when you are committing weeks before any money arrives, when the client wants a retainer with rolling invoices, or when the fee is large enough that being paid ninety days late would actually hurt. At that point the accounts tell you whether the company has the scale it presents, and the filing history tells you whether it pays attention to obligations.

What none of this tells you

Whether the person briefing you can bind the company. This is the most useful gap to understand, because it concerns the person you actually deal with. Section 21 of the Companies Act 2013 allows a company’s contracts to be signed by any key managerial personnel, or by an officer or employee “duly authorised by the Board in this behalf”. The register publishes the directors and signatories, with their DINs and MCA’s own disqualification flag, and nothing at all about that second group. The resolution authorising them is not a filed document.

So you can confirm a director is a director, and what a DIN does and does not prove covers how far that goes. You cannot confirm the marketing manager who approved your scope had authority to. The fix is paperwork: get the engagement confirmed by someone whose name is on the register, or by someone who states in writing that they are authorised.

Whether they pay on time. Nothing in the register records payment behaviour. Filing punctuality is a proxy, and a weak one.

Anything about cash between filings. The newest accounts on the register can be close to nineteen months old, because section 96 allows the annual general meeting six months after a 31 March year end and section 137 thirty days after that, and that set stays the newest until the following October.

What to do, before you start the work

1. Get the legal name and CIN, and check them. Before the proposal, not after the dispute.
2. Register on Udyam today if you have not. Free, your own Aadhaar and PAN, and it must pre-date the invoice to be worth anything.
3. Get scope, fee and payment terms in writing. A work order is a filing requirement later, and forty-five days is a ceiling you can negotiate down rather than an entitlement the client is owed.
4. State interest on delay in your terms. The statutory right exists regardless, and saying so changes how the invoice is treated.
5. Read the filing currency, not the accounts. Last AGM and last balance sheet date, and whether anything is actually overdue for a company that age.
6. Buy the filings only when the exposure is weeks of unpaid work, not on every project.

None of this makes a client pay. What it does is make sure that if they do not, you are an enterprise with a dated registration, a written scope and a stated term, rather than a person with an email thread. If it does go wrong, the checks change shape, and what the filings tell you about whether a client can pay picks up from there.

Entiva retrieves MCA filings and organises what comes back. We are not affiliated with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs.