Register of Trading Companies

Full description

System of Arrangement/Control

Series : Range of trading company registration numbers on spine. Volumes from late 1928 also numbered sequentially.

Contents : Sequential trading company registration number (one company per page).

Range Control Symbols

Series : period 1864 - 1928: 1 to 586 - 13501 to 14000
period 1928 - 1958: 1/14001 - 51/39001 to 39500

Contents : 1 to 39500

Since 1864 incorporated trading companies have been required under the Companies Statute and Subsequent Companies Acts to lodge with the Government evidence of their incorporation, name and any significant practices or changes to the company's registration.

Creation of this register was originally established in section 15 of the Companies Statute and incorporated in subsequent Companies Acts. Specifically this series records:

the registration number allocated to each trading company; and
the receipt and filing of all documents received from and placed upon the relevant trading company registration file.

This series is therefore the prime controlling record for VPRS 932 trading Company Registration Files.

Contents

Each folio (or page) within these registers is sequentially numbered. Detail pertaining to each individual company is usually recorded on a single page or folio. The number of the page or folio forms the registered trading company number.

The following detail is recorded on initial registration:
full name of the company,
amount of capital available to the company, and
the number of shares to be initially issued.

Individual documents received are entered on the same page and detail:
date of document
date of registration of document
description of the document, and
sequential number allocated to documents as placed within the relevant file.

If available space on a page was filled, subsequent entries were usually recorded on another page(s) within the same register and then the next available vacant page(s) or folio(s). The complete record of documents received from a given company could thus be spread across a number of separate registers which are all cross referenced. The registered trading company number does not change in these instances.

Pages may also be annotated with details of the publication of Government Gazette notices pertaining to the dissolution of the company and the cancellation of the registration.

System of Arrangement/Control

Volumes are arranged in chronological order by registration dates. The range of page (or company) numbers is imprinted on the spines of each register. Volumes created from late 1928 were also sequentially numbered. These numbers do not appear have any significance in the overall record keeping system and were probably allocated simultaneously.

Indexes

Alphabetical indexes were also created to identify a company's registration number and thus provide a means of entry into the registers. Two series have been identified to date:

and index created around 1941 detailing all registrations current at that time (VPRS 8271), and

indexes which identified defunct registrations (VPRS 8270).

Trading company registration numbers can also be obtained from one of two microfiche indexes generated for archival use from a computer system which contained detail on all trading companies defunct by August 1990 and the other (VPRS 8267) covers registrations still current at the end of August 1990.

End of Series

Information relating to companies registered after company number 39500 in 1958 was recorded on a card based register. Detail continued to be entered into the volumes of this series for those companies originally recorded in the registers. This continued until the early 1970's when this information also began to be entered on the card register system. Company entries converted to cards are identified by the annotation "card" written across the page.

The card register was destroyed by Corporate Affairs early in 1991 following microfilming.