How to find out what a private Indian company earns

“Private company” sounds like the accounts are private. In India they are not. Every company registered under the Companies Act files its audited financial statements with the Registrar of Companies each year, and those filings are public records that anyone may pay a small fee to read.

So the revenue of a private Indian company is obtainable. The questions worth answering are where the number sits, and how much it is worth once you have it.

Where the number actually is

The figure you want — turnover, or revenue from operations — appears in the statement of profit and loss, which is filed as an attachment to the company’s annual financial statement filing (Form AOC-4). It is not a field you can read off a summary page. It is a line item inside a PDF attached to a form.

That distinction matters, and it is the single most common misunderstanding about this data:

• MCA master data gives you the company’s identity — name, CIN, status, incorporation date, registered office. It contains no financial figures at all. This is the free part, and it is what most “company search” sites are showing you.
• The annual filing contains the accounts. Getting it means paying the registry’s document fee for that company and retrieving the filing itself.

Any site showing you a revenue figure for a private Indian company got it from the second thing, whether or not they show you the document.

What to do with the number once you have it

Three cautions, in order of how often they catch people out.

It is old. A company’s accounts are filed months after the financial year they describe. By the time a filing is on the register, the business it describes has moved on — sometimes considerably. There is no live revenue figure for a private Indian company. Anyone offering one is quoting the same delayed filing.

It may not exist. A company that has stopped filing has no recent accounts on the register at all. This is a finding, not a technical failure: a three-year gap in annual filings tells you something important about the company. What matters is knowing the difference between “they did not file” and “we could not fetch it” — and being told which one you are looking at.

It is what was filed, not what is true. The registrar records the filing; it does not audit the filer. The accounts are signed off by an auditor, which is meaningful, but the document proves a filing was made on a date rather than proving the business performed as stated.

Reading it properly

When you do have the statement in front of you, a few habits make the number far more useful:

• Read revenue next to the previous year, which the statement shows as a comparative column. A single year’s turnover tells you size; two years tell you direction, which is usually the question you actually had.
• Separate revenue from operations and other income. A company whose growth is coming from other income is not growing in the way the headline suggests.
• Check the auditor’s report for qualifications. A qualified opinion or an emphasis-of-matter paragraph is the auditor telling you where to look, in writing, and it is routinely ignored.
• Cross-read against the directors’ report, which often explains a movement the numbers alone leave ambiguous.

The shortest honest route

If you want this for one company, once: find the company on the register, confirm you have the right entity by its CIN, then pay MCA’s document fee and retrieve the annual filings. Expect to work the portal eight times over to see everything the company has filed, with a fresh CAPTCHA every few documents, and expect the files to arrive as encoded archives rather than PDFs.

If you want it repeatedly, that manual loop is the whole cost of the exercise — and it is the reason Entiva exists. You can look up any company on the register free, and we handle the retrieval, verification and indexing when you need the accounts behind it.

Either way, insist on the document. A revenue figure you cannot trace to a filing is a rumour with a decimal point.