How to check a company before you accept a job offer
Before you resign, spend ten minutes on the public record. The entity on your offer letter, its filings, and the EPFO check most candidates never do.
Have a company in mind? Check it now.
Search the register free to see its status. Then order its filings to see who runs it, what it earns and what it owes.
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The offer is in your inbox. The salary is better, the title is better, and to take it you have to resign from a job that currently pays you.
That is the asymmetry worth pausing on. You are being asked to give up a certain income for an uncertain one, usually with a notice period in between where you have neither. Ten minutes on the public record will not tell you whether you will enjoy working there. It will tell you whether the company exists, whether anyone is filing on its behalf, and whether it is registered to pay you the things the offer letter promises.
Start with the entity, not the brand
The name on the door and the name on the offer letter are frequently different, and for a startup they are almost always different.
Take the legal name from the offer letter. The one at the top, or in the signature block, or on the appointment terms. It will usually end in Private Limited, Limited, or LLP.
Then look for the CIN, the 21-character identifier. Offer letters often carry it in the footer. If it is not there, ask for it, framed as harmlessly as it actually is: you need it for your records.
Two things to notice while you are there:
A holding company with a different name is normal. “Kettle” the product may be “Kettle Technologies Private Limited”, or it may be a brand of something entirely unrelated-sounding. Not a red flag, just a fact to get straight, because the entity on the offer letter is the entity that owes you your salary.
A foreign parent with an Indian subsidiary is also normal, and it matters who is employing you. An Indian private limited subsidiary is on the MCA register. A branch or liaison office is a different animal, and a parent company overseas is not on this register at all.
Reading the CIN will already tell you the state, the year of incorporation, and whether the company is private or public before you look anything up.
What the register tells you about this job, not about companies in general
Whether the entity on the offer letter exists, and whether it is still on the register, is the two-minute check on whether a company is real. Strike Off, Under process of striking off, Under Liquidation or Under CIRP all mean stop and ask, and what each status means sets out which.
The rest of this is what that check does not tell a candidate.
When was it incorporated? A company founded eight months ago is a different proposition from one founded in 2014. Neither is wrong. Your notice period and your savings should know which one you are joining.
What is its paid-up capital? For a funded startup this is a rough proxy for how much equity capital has been raised in India, because a priced round means new shares issued and the paid-up figure goes up. A company with ₹1 lakh of paid-up capital hiring twenty people is running on revenue, debt, or optimism.
Who are the directors, and have they been changing? Director appointments and resignations are filed and dated. A cluster of departures in the last year is worth knowing before you hand in your notice.
The check almost no candidate does
Go to the EPFO establishment search, which is public and free, and look the employer up.
You can search by part of the establishment name or by the seven-digit code. There is no login and no account: the only gate is a captcha. The result is laid out in panels headed things like Establishment Status, Establishment Details, Validity Status with a link to view payment details, units under the same jurisdiction, and other establishments with the same PAN.
We are not going to give you a precise field list, because every attempt to run a live search while writing this returned a server error from EPFO’s own backend. What the page structure shows is that registration, status and payment-related information are there. Whether it exposes an employee count is something you will have to see for yourself.
Why it matters more than it sounds: if your offer letter has a provident fund line in the salary structure, the employer needs to be registered and actually remitting. An employer who is not registered, or whose remittances have gaps, is telling you something about how it manages payroll obligations that no Glassdoor review will.
This is also the check that distinguishes the job-seeker’s version of due diligence from everybody else’s. The MCA register tells you about the company. EPFO tells you about the company as an employer.
When it is worth paying for the accounts
The free layer answers “is this real”. It does not answer “can they pay me for the next two years”, and nothing public answers that exactly. But the filed accounts get you closer than anything else, and the registry fee is ₹100 for the company’s whole file.
Three things to read, in order.
Have they been filing at all? Every company files annual accounts and an annual return each year, and late filing costs ₹100 per day per form. So a company that has not filed for two years is not being casual, and how to read a filing gap sets out when a missing year is genuinely missing.
Revenue and its direction. One year tells you little. Three tell you whether the business is growing. Finding a private company’s revenue is fiddlier than it sounds because the numbers are attachments inside the AOC-4 rather than fields.
Losses, in context. A funded startup losing money is doing what it said it would do. The question is not whether there are losses but whether capital has been arriving to fund them. New equity shows up as fresh share allotments and a rising paid-up capital between one annual return and the next. Losses growing while paid-up capital stands still, for two years, is the pattern to worry about.
What the register cannot tell you, and it is most of what you care about
Whether they will pay you on time. Salary delays are not a filing.
Whether there are layoffs coming. Not a filing either.
Anything about the manager, the team, or the work. The register describes a legal entity. You are joining a group of people.
How much runway is left. Accounts filed in January 2026 describe the year that ended in March 2025. By the time you read them they are eighteen months old. Recent funding may be entirely invisible, and so may a recent collapse.
And it lags. A director who resigned in June may still be listed in September.
So treat all of this as a floor, not a verdict. It rules out the small number of situations that are genuinely bad, and it gives you specific, factual things to raise in conversation, which is the part most candidates find hardest to do without sounding suspicious.
The tactful way to ask
You do not have to be adversarial about any of it. Framed as ordinary diligence, these questions are entirely normal and a decent employer will answer them without blinking:
- “Which entity will I be employed by, and can I have the CIN for my records?”
- “Is PF handled in-house or through a provider?”
- “When did you last raise, and what is the runway looking like?”
The answers matter, and so does the reaction. A company that treats “which entity am I joining” as an odd question has answered a different one.
What to actually do, before you resign
- Get the legal name and CIN from the offer letter.
- Check status, incorporation date, paid-up capital and directors. Free, ten minutes.
- Check EPFO registration. Free.
- If the company is young or the move is costly, buy the accounts and read the last three years. What a retrieval covers is the same file a lender would pull.
- Ask the three questions above, and notice how they land.
- Do not resign until the offer is signed by the entity you checked, in its name, not a brand.
None of this is about catching anyone out. It is about making a large, hard-to-reverse decision with ten minutes of facts rather than none, and the facts happen to be free.
Written by the Entiva team, who read Indian company filings for a living. Not legal or career advice.
Frequently asked
How can I check if a company is genuine before joining?
Take the exact legal name from the offer letter, not the brand name, and look it up. If it is not Active, stop. Then check incorporation date against your notice period, paid-up capital as a proxy for funding, recent director changes, and whether the employer is registered with EPFO. All of it is free and takes about ten minutes.
Can I see if a company is paying provident fund for its employees?
EPFO runs a public establishment search that shows whether an employer is registered, its establishment code and status, and payment and validity details. It is free. An employer offering PF in the salary structure who does not appear there is worth asking about.
Should I worry if a startup is making losses?
Not on its own. Funded startups are usually loss-making by design. What matters more is whether fresh capital has been coming in, which shows up as share allotments and a rising paid-up capital, and whether the company has kept filing at all.
