In practice, the majority of business partners and other people usually identify a particular company by its most evident feature - its name. At the same time, it should be stressed that the main means of identification is the company's registration number. The name of the company might change several times during its lifetime, but the registration number will remain the same, as originally assigned to that company at the moment of its incorporation and registration.

In most jurisdictions, the registration number appears on the registration certificate of the company. However, various jurisdictions have different principles of numbering - for example, in one country all the different types of company could be subject to common numeration in a single, unified manner. In the United Kingdom, on the contrary, the registration number provides information about the type of company - in particular, the composition of the registration number of UK LLPs is totally different to the composition of the numbers of ordinary limited (Ltd.) companies.

The issue of a registration number is very important due to the fact that most banks require this number to be shown on applications for opening an account with them. It follows that sometimes a properly registered company is not able to open a bank account because its country of incorporation, although assigning a registration number to the company, has stored this information in a database, and has not divulged it on the company's incorporation documents. The only solution in such cases might be to request a special certificate from the country of incorporation confirming the relevant company's registration number.