Getting a D-U-N-S number as a sole proprietor in India

A D-U-N-S number is a nine-digit business identifier issued by Dun & Bradstreet. It is free, it is not a government registration, and until recently most small developers never needed one.

That changed. Google Play requires a D-U-N-S number for organisation developer accounts, and Apple requires one to enrol in the Developer Program as an organisation. If you want your apps published under your business name rather than your personal name, you need one.

We went through this as a sole proprietorship in Tamil Nadu. Several questions had answers that were not obvious.

What is your legal name?

This one trips up nearly everybody.

A sole proprietorship is not a separate legal entity. There is no incorporation, no registrar, no certificate creating a company. Legally, the proprietor is the business. That means:

• Your legal name is your own name
• Your trade name is what you trade under
• The business uses your personal PAN, because there is no company PAN to have

So on the application you enter your own name as the legal name, with the trade name as a trading style — commonly written as "Your Name, Trading as Your Business". Entering only the trade name is the most common mistake, and it produces a record that matches nothing.

The document that does the work

D&B verifies you exist. In India, the single most useful document a small business can point at is the Udyam registration — the MSME registration from the Ministry of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises. It is free, it is issued by the government, and it is publicly verifiable on the Udyam portal.

If you do not have one, get it before you apply. It gives the verification something to land on.

Check the name order on your own certificate

This cost us an hour of confusion and is worth knowing about.

Our Udyam certificate reads the owner's name surname first — the portal pulled it from Aadhaar and reversed it. PAN and Aadhaar themselves read it the other way round. Two government documents, two orders, one person.

There is a neat trick for settling which is the surname: the fifth character of an Indian PAN is the first letter of the holder's surname. If your PAN is ABCPG1234D, the G means your surname begins with G. That is defined by the PAN structure, not a guess.

Why it matters: D&B records a name, and then Google Play validates your D-U-N-S number against D&B's record. If Play has one spelling and D&B has another, the lookup fails. So the sequence is:

1. Apply with the name that matches your PAN
2. When the number is issued, read the record D&B actually created — it may be formatted differently from what you submitted
3. Use that version everywhere afterwards

Consistency is the whole game

D&B builds its picture from your website and from public sources. The single most common cause of a stalled application is not a missing document — it is the same business described three slightly different ways in three places.

Pick the exact strings once. Name, address, phone. Then use them character-for-character on:

• Your website
• Your Play Console developer profile
• Your Google Business Profile
• Your domain registration

We put ours on a dedicated /company page: trade name, legal name, entity type, registered address, phone, email, date the business commenced, Udyam number, line of business, employee count. One page, one source, easy to point at.

We also added schema.org Organization markup to it. That is the machine-readable version of the same facts — name, address, phone, founder, identifier — which is what automated checks read rather than your prose.

What not to publish

Your Udyam certificate contains your PAN and your bank account and IFSC. Neither belongs on a website, ever. Publishing a PAN invites identity fraud.

The Udyam registration number is fine to publish — it is a business identifier like a GSTIN, verification on the portal still requires an OTP to your registered mobile, and businesses print it on invoices routinely.

Be deliberate about your address too. If you work from home, publishing the street address is the strongest verification signal available — and it puts your home on the public internet. A middle path: publish the full address on your site if you are comfortable, and register your Google Business Profile as a service-area business, where Google verifies the address but does not show it on Maps.

Answer the phone

D&B verifies applications by telephoning the number you gave them.

Make sure whoever might pick up knows the business name and expects the call. An unanswered phone, or someone answering who has never heard of the company, is a genuinely common reason an application stalls — and it is the easiest thing on this list to get right.

Free or paid — and what the difference actually is

You will be offered both. The distinction is not well explained anywhere, so here it is as it was explained to us by D&B directly.

The number itself is free. The free route — D&B calls it FOC, free of cost — issues you a genuine D-U-N-S number. That is the thing Google Play and Apple check, and the free one satisfies both completely. If a website is charging you for a D-U-N-S number, walk away.

What the free route gives you is a minimal record: essentially your organisation name and address. Enough to be verified as existing. Nothing more.

The paid route, which was quoted to us at around ₹20,000, is a different product. It creates a fuller company profile on D&B's own site — detailed information about the business rather than just a name and an address — and it comes with a named contact at D&B (they use the title "Strategic Account Planner") who moves the request along rather than leaving it in the standard queue.

Whether that is worth ₹20,000 depends entirely on why you want the number:

• Publishing apps under a business name — the free number is sufficient. Google and Apple check that the number exists and matches; neither reads your D&B profile.
• Selling to corporates, bidding for contracts, or applying for credit — a richer profile is what those counterparties actually look up, and the paid route is aimed squarely at them.

For a small studio getting onto Play and the App Store, the free route is the right answer.

The free-route timeline, and the trap in it

This is the part worth writing down, because one step will quietly cancel your application if you miss it. As explained to us for standard FOC processing:

Total: roughly 30 business days, excluding weekends and public holidays.

1. A document upload link arrives within 19 business days of your initial request.
2. ⚠️ That link is live for only 5 days. If you do not upload your documents inside that window, the request is cancelled automatically and you start again.
3. After you submit, allow about 12 further business days for the number to be issued.

So the failure mode is this: you apply, hear nothing for three or four weeks, stop checking your inbox — and the one email that matters arrives with a five-day fuse. Watch for it, and have your documents ready before it lands so uploading is a ten-minute job rather than a scramble.

Note these are business days. Nineteen business days is close to a calendar month once weekends and holidays are counted, and the whole thing can comfortably run past six weeks end to end.

Sequence, and one shortcut

If your reason for needing one is Apple, note that Apple runs its own free D-U-N-S lookup and request form, which is often faster than applying through D&B directly.

One ordering note: if you plan a Google Play organisation account, you cannot create it until the number exists — Google looks it up during signup. So the D-U-N-S comes first and everything else follows. Start early; the timeline above is longer than most people plan for.