How to download a company's documents from the MCA portal, and what it actually costs you

You need a company’s balance sheet. Or its list of shareholders, or the charge that a bank registered over its assets three years ago. You have found the MCA portal, you have found the page that says View Public Documents, and somewhere between there and the file on your desk the whole thing has become considerably more annoying than it looked.

This is the honest version of that route. What is free, what the ₹100 buys, and the four constraints the tutorials tend to leave out because they finish writing at the payment screen.

First, the part that costs nothing

Before you pay for anything, a surprising amount of it is free.

One caveat on the mechanics, because MCA moves things: parts of the V3 portal that were once open have been going behind a sign-in. An MCA user account is free to create either way, so what follows is free in the sense that matters, even if you are asked to log in for some of it.

Go to mca.gov.in, and under MCA Services look for Master Data. A search by company name or CIN returns the company’s current status, its date of incorporation, its registered office state, its authorised and paid-up capital, its directors, and, under a separate menu item, its index of charges: the list of loans secured against its assets.

That is a lot. For most questions it is enough. If you are checking whether a company exists, whether it is still alive, and how old it is, you have your answer in about three minutes and you have spent nothing. The two-minute reality check runs entirely on this free layer.

What master data will not give you is anything the company actually filed. No accounts. No annual return. No shareholder list. No charge documents, only the fact that charges exist. For those you pay.

The paid route, step by step

The service is called View Public Documents, and on the V3 portal it lives at MCA Services → Document Related Services → View Public Documents V3. You need a registered MCA user account, which is free to create, and you need to be logged in.

From there the flow is:

1. Search for the company by name or CIN and select it from the results.
2. Pick one document category and, optionally, filter by year. There are eight categories and you can only choose one at a time. Hold that thought.
3. Add the company to your cart. Note the wording: you add the company, not the documents. This is the point at which the fee attaches.
4. Pay. MCA hands you off to BharatKosh, the Government of India’s Non-Tax Receipt Portal, which is where the money is actually collected. You come back with an SRN, the service request number that is your receipt for the purchase.
5. Go to My Workspace → Documents, find the company, and download.

The fee is ₹100 per company. That is the part most people get wrong in a useful direction: it is not per document. One payment covers every form the registry holds for that company, across every category and every year. If the company has filed for fifteen years, ₹100 buys the lot.

The four constraints nobody mentions

Here is where the route stops being a tutorial and starts being a logistics problem. MCA states the rules on its own download page, and they are worth reading in full because each one changes how you have to plan the exercise:

• A maximum of 5 documents per Company/ LLP can be downloaded at a time for every successful transaction.
• Post successful payment, Company/ LLP documents will be available for download in ‘My Workspace’ for 7 days.
• Once a user initiates download of any document for a particular Company/ LLP, a time limit of a maximum of 3 hours will get enabled.
• All downloaded documents having .OCT extension need to be extracted using a file compression application (such as 7-zip) and then opened using Adobe Acrobat.

Four sentences, four separate ways to lose an afternoon.

Five documents at a time. Not five per session, five per selection. A company with twenty filings in one category is four rounds of tick, download, wait, tick again.

Seven days to view. Generous, and not the clock that bites.

Three hours once you start. This is the binding one, and it starts the moment you download your first document for that company. Not when you paid. Not when you logged in. If you open one file at 10am to check you have the right company and then go to a meeting, you have until 1pm to get everything else, and the seven-day window does not save you.

The practical consequence: work out the full list of what you want before you download anything at all. Browse the categories, note what is there, and only then start pulling.

And they arrive as .OCT files. Not PDFs. .OCT is an archive, and MCA’s own instruction is to extract it with something like 7-Zip and then open what is inside with Adobe Acrobat. If you have ever downloaded an MCA document, double clicked it, and had your machine ask what application to use, that is why. It is not corrupted.

The eight categories, and why they matter

The category picker is the step that decides how long the whole job takes, because you can select one at a time. To see everything a company has ever filed, you make eight passes through the same flow.

#	Category	What is in it
1	Incorporation Documents	The MoA, the AoA, and the forms that created the company
2	Annual Returns and Balance Sheet eForms	AOC-4 and MGT-7, with the audited accounts attached
3	Change in Directors/Designated Partner	Every appointment, resignation and change, dated
4	Charge Documents	Charges created, modified and satisfied over the company’s assets
5	Certificates	Certificates the registrar issued against the company’s filings
6	LLP Forms (Conversion of company to LLP)	Only where a company converted into an LLP
7	Other eForm Documents	Capital changes, office shifts, resolutions, the long tail
8	Other	Attachments the registry does not slot anywhere else

Most questions live in two of these. If you want to know what the company earns, you want category 2, and the accounts are attachments inside the AOC-4 rather than separate rows, which is why finding a private company’s revenue is more fiddly than it sounds. If you want to know who has a claim on its assets, you want category 4.

What a real document list looks like

Descriptions of this route always stop before the interesting part, so here is an actual manifest. A small private company, category 2, all years:

Date filed	Form	What it is	Pages
28/01/2025	MGT-7A	Form MGT-7A	13
28/01/2025	MGT-7A	List of Directors	1
28/01/2025	MGT-7A	List of share holders, debenture holders	1
28/01/2026	AOC-4	Copy of Financial Statements (incl. Board’s/auditor’s report)	26
28/01/2026	AOC-4	Form AOC-4	23
28/01/2026	MGT-7A	Form MGT-7A	15
28/01/2026	MGT-7A	List of share holders, debenture holders	1
28/01/2026	MGT-7A	Photograph of registered office	1
28/01/2026	EDIRECTOR	e-Director’s Report	11

Nine documents, one category, one company. At five per selection that is two rounds. And notice what the manifest quietly tells you before you have opened a single file: both years were filed on the same day in January, the shareholder list is one page, and somebody photographed the registered office because the form asked them to.

Notice also what is not there. This company has filed nothing under charges, which means no lender has registered a claim over its assets. An empty category is a finding.

What this route will not do for you

It will not tell you the company is honest. The register holds what was filed. It does not audit it, and it does not know what happened last week. Filings run months behind the events they describe.

It will not fill in a year the company never filed. If the accounts for 2024 are missing, they are missing because nobody sent them, and no amount of paying ₹100 conjures them up. That absence is itself information, and often the most useful information on the page.

It is not a certified copy. What you download is the document as filed, without attestation. If you need something a court or a bank will accept as authenticated, MCA runs a separate Get Certified Copies service, it costs more, and the copy comes from the jurisdictional registrar rather than instantly from your workspace. Do not use one where the other is required.

And it is per company. Checking five suppliers is five searches, five payments, five three-hour windows, five sets of .OCT files.

What to do with all this

1. Do the free checks first. Status, incorporation date, and the index of charges cost nothing and answer most questions. Pay only when they do not.
2. Confirm the entity by CIN before you pay. Near-identical names across states are common, and ₹100 spent on the wrong company is ₹100 gone.
3. Decide what you need before you click download. The three-hour clock starts on the first file, not the first page.
4. Budget eight passes if you genuinely want everything, and expect a captcha on each one.
5. Keep the originals. Extract the .OCT, keep the PDFs, and note the date you retrieved them. A filing you can produce later is worth more than a summary you cannot source.
6. If the answer has to be defensible, consider whether you need the certified route instead.

Why use Entiva instead of MCA directly?

MCA is the official source, and the documents are the same public filings. Entiva changes the work around them. It runs all eight category searches, unpacks the downloaded archives, checks every file and organises the result as one set. During MCA’s seven-day access window, it can check again and add only the newer filings, without repeating the original download by hand.

You can also put a company on alert. Entiva checks MCA once a day and tells you in the app and by email when a new filing appears. The alert is free; reading the new documents still requires an order and MCA’s registry fee.

If you only need a company’s name, status, incorporation date or state, there is no reason to buy its filings. Use MCA directly or Entiva’s free lookup. If you need the complete document set, expect to repeat the check later, or watch several companies, Entiva removes the repetitive work while keeping MCA as the source.

What that costs and what a fee covers is on the pricing page, registry fee included.

Either way, the documents are public and the register is open. The only real question is whose afternoon it is.

Written by the Entiva team, who retrieve MCA filings for a living and have lost more than one afternoon to the three-hour clock.