Before you sign with a new partner, ship on account or extend payment terms, a quarter of an hour spent on what the public registers say about them is time well spent. In Slovenia a lot of it is public, and free.
1. Find the entity in the business register
Start from the matična številka — the ten-character number an entity receives when it is entered in the Poslovni register Slovenije. It is its primary identifier, it does not change, and it is not reissued after the entity is struck off. The last three characters separate a company from its branches: 5043611000 is the company, 5043611001 one of its units.
Look at three things: whether the entity is active or in liquidation or bankruptcy, when it was registered, and its legal form. A company founded yesterday is not a bad sign in itself, but it does mean you have no history to judge it on.
2. See who stands behind it
Directors and shareholders are held in the court register, part of the business register. Two questions matter: whether the person negotiating with you actually has authority to act for the company, and whether the directors have changed recently. A change on its own says nothing — a change immediately before a large transaction is worth asking about.
For companies under state or municipal control, directors, supervisory boards and holdings are published in full in the register of public-information obligors. For private companies AJPES sells that data, so it is not free everywhere.
3. Check for insolvency proceedings
This step is hard in many countries and in Slovenia it is free and instant. Every act in an insolvency proceeding is published in the AJPES official publications — bankruptcy, compulsory settlement, simplified compulsory settlement, compulsory winding-up. The archive reaches back to 2005.
An opened case changes everything: payments can later be challenged, and your claim joins a queue. What matters is whether the proceeding is open or concluded — a bankruptcy that ended ten years ago is a different fact from one running now.
4. Check the VAT identification
If a partner invoices you with VAT, they must be identified for VAT purposes. Check the number — SI plus eight digits — in the European Commission's VIES system, which answers for the whole EU.
Check also whether the identification has been withdrawn. The Slovenian tax authority can withdraw it ex officio, and the list of withdrawals is public. A withdrawn VAT number is one of the few genuinely concrete risk signals you can read free from public data.
5. Read what has been published about the company
Court register entries, notices under the Companies Act — mergers, demergers, general meetings — and documents deposited with the registry court are all public. They carry a history the register extract does not: when the company was transformed, when it changed hands, when its articles were last amended.
Annual report data is sold by AJPES, so you will not find it on free portals. For one company at a time you can read it on the AJPES site.
What it adds up to
No single one of these is a decision. Together they give a picture clear enough to decide whether to ask for payment up front, shorten the terms, or simply go ahead. And all five are public — you need nobody's permission to look.