Short answer
Colombia's public record of manufacturers is RUES, the business register of the chambers of commerce, published by Confecámaras with tax ID, activity code and status but no address. Testigo holds 70,609 active manufacturing companies from the 2026-10-02 edition.
Key facts
- Registry
- RUES (Registro Único Empresarial y Social), extract on datos.gov.co
- Publisher
- Confecámaras, the confederation of chambers of commerce
- Edition read
2026-10-02. The publisher states a monthly update- One row is
- One registration. Among active manufacturers, one company
- Manufacturing legal entities in the file
- 202,881
- On Testigo
- 70,609. Loaded so far: Active legal entities
- Tax ID in the file
- Yes, NIT
- Licence
- Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0
RUES: what it is and who publishes it
Companies and traders in Colombia register with their local chamber of commerce. RUES is the single register that joins the chambers. Confecámaras publishes an extract on the national open data portal with 9,436,330 rows of all kinds.
758,723 rows have a manufacturing code as their main activity. 555,702 of them are natural persons, which Testigo did not load. 202,881 are legal entities.
Testigo holds the 70,609 legal entities whose registration is active and was renewed in 2025 or 2026. Among them there are no branch or establishment rows, so the record is one per company.
The licence is share-alike. Testigo keeps Colombia as its own layer, credited to its publisher.
Which fields exist, and which do not
| Field | In RUES | What to know |
|---|---|---|
| Tax ID | Yes | The NIT. The file's own nit column is often empty; the identification number is used instead. |
| Legal name | Yes, every row | A short name, the sigla, exists for a minority of rows. |
| Activity | Yes, every row | A four-digit CIIU code, Colombia's version of the international classification. |
| Status and renewal | Yes | The state of the registration and the last year it was renewed. |
| Registration date | Yes | The record shows the year. |
| Chamber of commerce | Yes | The only place in the file. Bogotá is the largest. |
| Address | No | RUES has no address. |
| Phone, email, website | No | Not in RUES. See below for the supplier register. |
| Size | No | The size filter leaves Colombia out. |
| Coordinates | No | Testigo shows an approximate position from the chamber's city. |
One other public source fills part of the gap. SECOP II, the state's register of suppliers, publishes an address, phone, email and website for the companies that signed up to sell to the state. Joined by NIT, it adds at least one contact field to 7,529 of the manufacturers on Testigo, 10.7% of them. It has the same share-alike licence.
What "active" means in Colombia
A registration has a state, and it must be renewed each year. A company can stay ACTIVA on paper for years without renewing. So Testigo asks for both: state ACTIVA and a renewal in 2025 or 2026.
In the edition read, 59,614 of the loaded companies had renewed in 2026 and 10,995 in 2025. The record shows the year.
The tax ID: NIT
A NIT has 9 digits and one check digit. You will see it written with or without the check digit, so a NIT of 10 digits is usually the same number with its check digit attached.
The official list: proveedores ficticios
DIAN, the tax office, publishes a list of suppliers it has declared fictitious, with the tax ID, the name and the date of the resolution. Testigo holds 1,108 rows from the edition of 2026-08-13 and ties them to records by NIT.
The list is a PDF. About ten rows that wrap across lines may have been lost in reading, and the file states no total to check against. No licence statement was found. Where the ID on the list belongs to a natural person, Testigo keeps the ID and removes the name.
Very few manufacturers are on it: 3 of the companies on Testigo had an entry in that edition.
How to search Colombia on Testigo
- Search by product or processUse the Colombia search. Words are matched against the legal name and the activity description.
- Narrow by region and sectorThe region comes from the chamber of commerce where the company is registered.
- Open the recordWith a free account you see the NIT, the renewal year, any DIAN entry and, for the companies in the supplier register, the published contact.
- Or browse by activityThe Colombia directory has 149 pages, one per manufacturing activity.
What is not checked
- Where the plant is. RUES has no address. The position is the chamber's city.
- How large the company is.
- Certificates, capacity, quality and financial health.
- The statistics office's own directory of companies. Its site could not be reached when it was tried, so it was not read.
As a spot check, 30 records were compared with the publisher's live data on 2026-10-05 and 30 matched on every field.
Frequently asked questions
What is RUES in Colombia?
RUES is the single business register that joins Colombia's chambers of commerce, run by Confecámaras. Its open extract lists each registration with the tax ID, legal name, activity code, state and the last year it was renewed. It has no address, phone or email. It is published under a share-alike Creative Commons licence.
How can I tell if a Colombian company is active?
Look at two things in the register: the state of the registration and the last year it was renewed. Registrations must be renewed every year, so a company marked active that last renewed years ago may not be operating. Testigo loads companies that are active and renewed in 2025 or 2026.
Why do most Colombian records have no address or contact?
Because the business register does not publish them. The only place in the file is the chamber of commerce. A minority of companies also appear in the state's supplier register, which does publish an address, phone, email and website. For those, the record shows the contact and its source.
Sources
- RUES: personas naturales, personas jurídicas y entidades sin ánimo de lucroConfecámaras, on datos.gov.co · edition 2026-10-02
- SECOP II: proveedores registradosColombia Compra Eficiente, on datos.gov.co · edition read 2026-10-03
- Proveedores ficticiosDIAN · edition 2026-08-13