Sole Entrepreneurs & Non-Profits

Not every registered entity has shareholders, and not every entity has a board. Topograph applies one consistent convention across all countries for the two entity families where the standard company data model doesn’t map one-to-one: sole entrepreneurs (natural-person businesses) and non-profits (associations, foundations, and similar forms). This page describes exactly what each datapoint returns for these entity types, so you don’t need entity-type-specific business rules on your side.

Sole entrepreneurs

A sole entrepreneur (French entrepreneur individuel, German eingetragener Kaufmann, Bulgarian едноличен търговец (ЕТ), Italian ditta individuale, Greek ατομική επιχείρηση, Ukrainian ФОП, and equivalents) is a natural person doing business without a separate legal personality. There is no share capital, no equity instrument, and no shareholder register anywhere.

Datapoint	Behavior
`company`	Returned normally. `legalForm.standardized` is `Sole Proprietorship`, so you can recognize the entity type from the response.
`legalRepresentatives`	Always the person. The owner is returned as the legal representative with the identity fields the register publishes (name, and where available date of birth, address, nationality). This is the record you need for sanctions/PEP screening.
`ultimateBeneficialOwners`	The person, at 100%. AML frameworks deem the sole trader the beneficial owner of the business, so where the country exposes a UBO datapoint, the owner is returned with 100% direct ownership, even when no separate UBO declaration exists in the register.
`shareholders`	Not applicable. The request completes with a `datapoint_not_applicable` error (see below). No shareholder record is ever synthesized.

The `datapoint_not_applicable` response

Requesting shareholders for a sole entrepreneur does not fail silently and does not return a misleading empty array. The datapoint completes as failed with a dedicated, machine-readable error code:

{
  "request": {
    "dataStatus": {
      "dataPoints": {
        "shareholders": {
          "status": "failed",
          "error": {
            "code": "datapoint_not_applicable",
            "message": "Sole entrepreneurs have no share capital, so no shareholder record exists. The owner is returned under legalRepresentatives and, where available, ultimateBeneficialOwners.",
            "retryable": false
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

Key properties:

It is not a fault. The code is a definitive answer derived from the entity’s legal form, not a register outage. Do not retry.
You are not charged when shareholders is the only datapoint of its billing block in the request: the block is automatically refunded like any other unfulfilled datapoint. When shareholders shares a block with datapoints that did deliver (for example company), the block is billed once, as usual.
The ownership answer still exists: read it from legalRepresentatives and ultimateBeneficialOwners instead.

If your pipeline iterates all datapoints uniformly, branch on error.code === "datapoint_not_applicable" to skip the ownership module for these entities, or simply rely on ultimateBeneficialOwners, which answers “who owns this business” for every entity type, including sole entrepreneurs.

Non-profits

Associations, foundations, and similar non-profit forms (French association loi 1901, German e.V., Irish CLGs, and equivalents) have members and boards, not shareholders.

Datapoint	Behavior
`company`	Returned normally, with the non-profit legal form.
`legalRepresentatives`	The officers/board members the register publishes (president, treasurer, directors, …).
`shareholders`	Not applicable where the legal form has no share capital: same `datapoint_not_applicable` semantics as sole entrepreneurs. Where a register genuinely publishes founder or member equity records (some countries do for specific forms), those records are returned as published.
`ultimateBeneficialOwners`	Follows each country’s register rules. Some beneficial-ownership registers include non-profit officers, others don’t. Check the country guide.

Coverage notes

Some countries structurally cannot serve sole entrepreneurs because no public register holds them (for example UK sole traders, or Hong Kong sole proprietorships, which live outside the companies register). Those return resource_not_found: a coverage fact, not an entity-type rule. Country-level coverage is on each country guide.
The rollout of the explicit datapoint_not_applicable response is per-country. Countries not yet converted may still return an empty shareholders array for these entity types; treat an empty array for a Sole Proprietorship legal form the same way you would treat the explicit code.

Reliability & Errors: the full error-code catalog
Shareholders Extraction: how shareholder data is sourced for regular companies
Coverage & Pricing: per-country entity coverage

Getting Started

Integration Guides

Core Features

Behavior & Operations

Sole Entrepreneurs & Non-Profits