companyID

Companyid is a generic term used to refer to a unique identifier assigned to a company within a database, registry, or software service. It serves to distinguish one legal entity from another and to link records such as customers, orders, and contracts to the correct organization. Depending on context, it may be written as companyId, company_id, or companyID.

External identifiers commonly associated with a company include formal registrations such as the UK Companies House number, the US Employer Identification Number (EIN), EU VAT numbers, DUNS numbers, and Legal Entity Identifiers (LEI). These external IDs are issued by different authorities or organizations for regulatory, taxation, or reporting purposes and are not interchangeable across systems.

In software and data architectures, a companyId is typically a stable key used to partition data in multi-tenant environments. It may be a UUID or another globally unique value, though some systems use numeric IDs. The internal companyId should remain stable even if the company changes its name; policies determine whether a new internal id is issued in events such as mergers or splits.

Governance and data quality concerns include validation, canonicalization, and mapping between internal and external identifiers. Maintaining referential integrity ensures records consistently reference the same company across systems and integrations.

Common usage areas include enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), billing, analytics, and API authentication schemes that pass a companyId to scope data access and processing.