Scope & method
Dartabase covers companies registered in Nepal, and Nepali-founded companies anywhere, from the point at which a documented business event occurs.
What qualifies for inclusion
A company enters the register when a citable source documents one of these: raised capital from an identifiable funder; acquired, was acquired, or merged; listed on NEPSE or a foreign exchange, or filed for IPO; an FDI approval; entry to a named accelerator or cohort; a shutdown or winding up; or a material public contract or licence.
None of these require a quality judgement. The existence of a source is the criterion. Judgement calls do not scale for one person and are the most common reason projects like this get abandoned.
Two coverage tiers
| Tier | Meaning | What a page shows |
|---|---|---|
| Registry | Appears in a bulk source. Name, ID, sector, date, one source. | A deliberately small, complete stub. Not a broken full page. |
| Covered | At least one qualifying event beyond bare registration. | Full event history with per-fact provenance. |
What is deliberately excluded
- Undisclosed rounds. If no source states an amount, no amount is shown. We never estimate one.
- Sole proprietorships and unregistered firms, by default.
- Government loan applicants. Awards only. A recent cycle drew 10,244 applications against a target of 400 to 550 loans, and those applications are not 10,244 trackable companies.
- Registry-derived personal data. Director and shareholder records from the Office of the Company Registrar may be held internally for matching, but are never rendered, exported, or included in a dump.
- Anything sourced from a commercial aggregator. No primary source means no entry.
Defunct companies are kept, not deleted. Recording failure is part of the point.
Known limits of coverage
Coverage is partial and openly so. Undisclosed rounds are invisible to us by construction. Nepali-language outlets carry most deal news first and much of it never gets an English write-up, so English-only coverage would miss the majority, which is why Nepali sources are weighted above English ones.
Where a source page could not actually be read (several Nepali outlets return 403 to automated requests), the entry says so plainly rather than implying we read it.
How dates and money are handled
- Dual calendar. Gregorian is shown first and is what every query uses. The Bikram Sambat date sits beneath it and is what the source document actually printed.
- Date precision is honoured. If a source gives only a month, only a month is shown. We never invent a day to fill a column.
- Nepali fiscal year runs Shrawan 1 to Ashadh end, roughly mid-July to mid-July. It is not a calendar year and is never treated as one.
- Amounts keep their original wording. “रु ५ करोड” is stored verbatim alongside the parsed number. Lakh is 100,000; crore is 10,000,000; arab is 1,000,000,000.
- Where two sources disagree on a date, the day is withheld. If one source dates an event to the 5th and another to the 7th, we do not split the difference or pick the better-looking source. The entry drops to month precision and says so. An honest month beats a confident wrong day.
- Where two sources give different amounts, both are shown. We do not pick a winner. Amounts are compared after parsing, so “NPR 20 million” and “NPR 2 crore” are correctly recognised as the same figure rather than a disagreement.
The provenance marks
Each mark is derived from the sources actually recorded against that entry, not set by hand.
Corrections and removal
Something wrong on a page? Use the link at the foot of any entry. Corrections with a source are applied; the route is honoured whether or not you can supply one.
Independence
Dartabase is independent and not affiliated with any government body. The name reads as official, since darta (दर्ता) means registration, so it is worth saying plainly that it isn't.