Selecting legal entities & addresses
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Last updated
Last updated
If you have an Enterprise or Office account, you can allow your users to select a legal entity from a database of legal entities and/or to select an address from the Google Maps database.
Clause9 provides access to the contents of most national entity registries in the world. End-users can simply choose a country, insert a company number or (part of a) name, and then get an overview of the administrative details of all the matching entities. When users select an entity, these details are copied to the answers of the Q&A.
Separately from the legal entities database, Clause9 also integrates with Google Maps to allow users to search for a specific address. Once an address is selected, it will be copied to the answers.
The legal entities and addresses databases partially overlap, but have different features and use cases:
The legal entities database is, evidently, limited to legal entities. The addresses database also contains addresses of consumers and companies that have no formally registered entity.
Unlike the legal entities database, the addresses database contains no information about a legal entity’s type, registered company number, VAT number or legal purpose.
Unlike the legal entities database, the addresses database is available in different languages. This will cause multilingual information to be translated — for example, the name of the country or (in some cities) the name of a street.
For most legal documents, it will be clear which of the two should be preferred. For example, if you require a VAT number or company number, then the legal entities database should be used. Conversely, in consumer contracts and real estate documents (which focus on location instead of entity), you will want to use the addresses database.
Both databases are used in roughly the same way within Clause9:
You insert a special connection tag in either a question (or a datafield connected to it). A special icon will then be shown to the right of this question, inviting the user to search in the relevant database.
You insert a special reception tag in each question (or a datafield connected to it) that needs to receive information point from the database — e.g., the street name or the VAT number.
Clause9 currently recognises four different special connection tags:
For the legal entities database:
entity-name, for the name of the legal entity
entity-number, for the registered entity/company number
For the addresses database:
location-lookup-address that allows end-users to search for an address, whether or not some company or legal entity is established at that address
location-lookup-establishment that allows end-users to search on the name of an establishment (company, legal entity, association, shop, etc.) with some associated address
For the addresses database, please note the following features:
Unlike the special connection tags for legal entities, the location-lookup-address and location-lookup-establishment tags do not also simultaneously act as special reception tags. Accordingly, you will probably want to complement the datafield/question with a separate special reception tag.
In other words: if you insert entity-name then the question will not be accompanied at the right by the icon for the legal entities database, but it will also act as a recipient for the name of the legal entity that gets chosen by the end-user. Conversely, if you insert a location-lookup-address into a datafield/question, then such question will get an icon at the right for the addresses database, but this question will not receive the address that gets selected by the end-user. If you want the question to receive the selected address, then you will need to insert the location-address special reception tag.
The underlying reason for this different behaviour is that the use of the addresses database must be much more flexible.
For the legal entities database:
entity-name, for the entity’s name (note that this special tag also acts as a special connection tag — see above)
entity-number, for the entity’s company number or otherwise registered number (note that this special tag also acts as a special connection tag — see above)
entity-country, for the full name of the entity’s country
entity-country-code, for the two-letter abbreviation code of the country
entity-type, for the full text version of the entity’s legal type (e.g., Société Anonyme or Private Limited Company)
entity-type-code, for the abbreviated version of the entity’s legal type (e.g., GmbH, SA, Inc.)
entity-street-nr-zip-city, for the combination of an entity’s street / nr / zip / city
entity-street-nr, for an entity’s number in the street
entity-city
entity-zip
entity-street
For the addresses database:
location-name, for the name of the establishment (will only function if the addresses database is being searched on establishment, i.e. will not work if searched on per address)
location-address, for the full address (street / number / zip / city / country)
location-street-nr, for the number in the street
location-street, for the street itself
location-zip
location-city
location-street-nr-zip-city, for a combination of the street / nr / zip / city
location-country, for the full name of the country
location-country-code, for the two-letter abbreviation code of the country
The first place where the special tags can be inserted, is in the special tags part of the datafields section of a concept, which you can access in Browse files mode or in Assemble document mode:
In both cases, you insert the tag by either typing it, or selecting it from the dropdown-list.
The two special connection tags for databases can optionally be extended with up to five different two-letter , in order to limit the end-user’s search range to those countries. For example, location-lookup-address|nl|fr will limit the search to the Netherlands and France, while location-lookup-address|uk would limit the search to the United Kingdom.
As per the and recommendation to , you probably want to use two-letter lowercase codes for countries. So you should prefer to use entity-country-code and location-country-code instead of entity-country and location-country.
The second place is in Q&A mode, more specifically, in the integration section of a question’s options (you first have to click on the button).
