Finding prospects in BODACC: who just changed, and why now

A company registry tells you who exists. It doesn’t tell you who has a reason to hear from you this week. BODACC, the French official bulletin of civil and commercial announcements, does: each announcement is an event, with a date, and an event is the best first line you can get.

What’s in it

The announcements are available as open data, through an API on Opendatasoft, and data.gouv.fr lists the dataset under France’s open licence. There’s no account or key. Each record has a family, here with the number of records we counted in the dataset in November 2026:

creation, new companies: about 6.7 million;
immatriculation, registrations: about 740,000;
modification, changes such as a new director or a move: about 8.6 million;
vente, sales and transfers of a business: about 900,000;
radiation, removals: about 4.3 million;
collective, insolvency proceedings: about 3.4 million;
dpc, filed accounts: about 26.7 million.

Querying it

The API uses Opendatasoft’s query language. New companies in the Rhône since the start of October:

GET https://bodacc-datadila.opendatasoft.com/api/explore/v2.1/catalog/datasets/annonces-commerciales/records
  ?where=familleavis="creation" AND numerodepartement="69" AND dateparution>="2026-10-01"
  &order_by=dateparution desc
  &limit=25

The fields you’ll use most are dateparution, numerodepartement, commercant (the company), registre (which holds the SIREN), listepersonnes and modificationsgenerales. Some of them hold JSON written inside a string, so parse them defensively. Three practical limits: a page holds at most 100 records, an offset can’t go past 10,000, and thousands of announcements share each date, so add the id to your sort or your pages will overlap.

Which events are worth a message

A new company in your target’s activity. It has choices to make right now: bank, accountant, software, insurance. BODACC gives you no activity code, so look the SIREN up in the registry and filter by NAF code.
A new director. Look for Modification de l'administration in modificationsgenerales. A new manager reviews suppliers, which is a better reason to write than a list you bought.
A business changing hands. A sale means a new owner, with a handover to get through.
A move or a new branch. Useful for anything local.

Treat radiation and collective with care. Writing to someone about their company’s insolvency is rarely welcome, and often in poor taste. Filed accounts say little about timing, which is why Coldlyne’s searches leave them out.

Turning an event into a first line

Say what happened, and why it brought you to them, in one sentence. Using a made-up example:

Hi Marie, I saw in BODACC that Northwind Conseil registered in Lyon last month. Most new consultancies choose their accounting tool in the first quarter, which is why I’m writing.

That sentence is checkable, and it’s also your answer to “where did you get my details?”. Don’t congratulate anyone on something you can’t know went well, and don’t pretend you’ve followed their company for years.

What the open licence doesn’t cover

An open licence on a dataset doesn’t lift data protection law. Announcements name people, and directors’ names are personal data. If you use them to prospect, the usual rules apply: a subject related to their profession, the sender’s identity, the source of the data, and a simple way to object. Check the registry before you write, because a company can refuse commercial use of its data.

BODACC also contains no email address. You still need to find a published one, on the company’s website. This post is general information, not legal advice.

Doing it every morning

The value of events fades quickly, so this works best as a habit. In Coldlyne, a watchlist reads the announcements each morning, keeps what matches your families, department, words, activities and legal forms, and adds it to a list, leaving out companies that refused prospecting. An assistant can ask the same thing through the search_bodacc and create_watchlist tools: “every holding created this week” is a complete instruction. And if you’d rather not use Coldlyne, the query above and a daily script will take you most of the way.