For most corporate practices the NUANS report is the least interesting line on the file and one of the most reliably irritating. It is a small, mandatory, time-sensitive step that sits between a client deciding on a name and the articles going out the door, and it is almost always procured through whichever search house the firm has been using for fifteen years.
That arrangement made sense when the price was trivial. It is worth revisiting now that it is not.
What changed in the corporate search market
The supply side consolidated. Dye & Durham acquired OnCorp in 2017 and bought Cyberbahn from Thomson Reuters in 2019, leaving ESC Corporate Services as the main remaining competitor for firm-integrated corporate search in Ontario. Since 2022, as reported by The Globe and Mail, list prices across that portfolio have risen steeply: Ontario business-name registration list pricing up several hundred percent, corporate search costs multiplying, and per-report costs for corporate records close to doubling. The company has also faced a proposed class action concerning its pricing conduct.
None of this changed the product. A NUANS report is a query against a single federal database administered under contract to Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada. Every licensed member queries the same data and returns substantively the same report. What a firm pays is a function of its supply relationship, not of data quality.
Three ways a firm can obtain reports
| Route | How it works | Best suited to |
|---|---|---|
| Direct NUANS membership | The firm becomes a licensed member and runs searches itself on usage-based fees | High-volume corporate departments with dedicated clerks and the appetite to administer it |
| Integrated search house | Reports ordered inside the firm's existing corporate-records and conveyancing platform | Firms whose minute-book and conveyancing workflow is already in that platform |
| Per-report provider | Order individual reports on a flat per-name fee with no account or minimum | Firms with moderate volume, or any firm unbundling the name search from its main platform |
The third route is the one most firms have not priced out, usually because the search has always travelled with the rest of the workflow. Unbundling it is unusually low-risk: a NUANS report is a self-contained PDF with a reference number, it does not need to originate from the same vendor as your minute books, and nothing downstream depends on where it came from.
What to check before moving a single line item
- Is it a filed report or a pre-search? Only a report with a reference number can support a filing. Several cheap offers are pre-searches.
- Does the provider cover the jurisdictions you actually file in? Ontario, Alberta and New Brunswick are the three that require a supplied NUANS report to incorporate, and Corporations Canada still requires one for a federal revival or amalgamation. Others, notably Saskatchewan and Manitoba, require a name reservation through their own system and will not accept a NUANS report at all, so a national practice needs to know which is which.
- Can multiple candidate names go on one order? Clients rarely settle on the first name.
- Is the distinctive element captured separately? Providers that only take a full name string will search whatever the algorithm guesses is distinctive.
- What is the turnaround, and what happens outside business hours? Reports are generally returned in minutes to hours.
- Is pricing flat and published, or contract-dependent and subject to revision?
- How is the report delivered, and does it arrive in a form you can drop straight onto the file?
The single biggest source of wasted searches
NUANS searches the distinctive element of a proposed name, not the whole string. "Maple Ridge Logistics Inc." is, for search purposes, a search on "Maple Ridge." If the distinctive element is submitted incorrectly, the report comes back valid, formally correct, and searching the wrong thing. It is not refundable and the error is invisible until an examiner raises a conflict the report never surfaced.
Where a client has supplied a name with an ambiguous structure, it is worth a clerk spending thirty seconds deciding what the distinctive element really is before the order goes out. Generic words such as services, management, holdings, enterprises and group should not be treated as distinctive; they flood the results and dilute the useful hits.
Docketing the 90-day clock
A NUANS report is conventionally valid for 90 days from the timestamp on the report, not from the day it reaches the file. On a straightforward incorporation that is ample. On a file where the name was searched early and the share structure, shareholders' agreement or tax planning then took two months to settle, it is a live risk.
Two habits mostly eliminate re-orders: diarise the expiry on the file the day the report arrives, and order the search once the structure is settled rather than at the moment the client first mentions a name.
Handling it as a disbursement
Name searches are ordinarily billed to the client as a disbursement, which means the amount is visible to the client on the account. Clients who can see that an equivalent report is advertised online for forty dollars will occasionally ask why the file shows a materially higher figure. There is no good answer other than the procurement channel.
Practical points worth confirming with your own accounts department: whether the provider's invoice identifies the client matter clearly enough to post without re-keying, whether HST is shown separately, and whether the receipt is in a form your trust accounting and audit process accepts. A per-name flat fee with a plain receipt is simpler to pass through than a bundled platform charge that has to be apportioned.
Ordering for more than one matter
Corporate practices tend to order in clusters: a reorganisation with three new holding companies, a client shortlisting names, a set of incorporations for a single group. Providers that take multiple proposed names on a single order collapse that into one transaction and one consolidated delivery, which is materially less administration than several separate orders with separate confirmations and separate receipts.
What Korporex is, and is not
Korporex is a Canadian document preparation and filing service, not a law firm. It does not provide legal advice, does not advise on whether a proposed name will be granted, and does not take conduct of a matter. For a firm, that is the point: it is a supplier of a discrete filing-quality deliverable, with no professional overlap and no prospect of it approaching your client.
Korporex runs NUANS name search reports at a flat $39.99 plus HST per proposed name, with no membership, no account minimum and no package requirement. Multiple proposed names go on a single order at the same flat rate each, the distinctive element is captured as its own field, and reports are returned by email.
If a client then needs the incorporation itself filed, or ongoing annual returns and registry maintenance handled outside the firm, those are separate services a firm can point a client to or order on the client's behalf.
Market pricing described in this guide reflects publicly published rates and press reporting as at September 2026 and is subject to change. Nothing here is legal advice, and firms remain responsible for their own professional obligations regarding disbursements, supplier selection and client disclosure.