Set up a PPSR Alert

I put up a post last month detailing how to conduct a search on the PPSR – primarily aimed at helping businesses keep abreast of any registrations that might have been lodged against them. 

By way of a companion piece, I thought I’d now write about how you can get an automatic alert from the PPSR any time someone lodges a registration against you.  The alert won’t give you any details beyond letting you know that a new registration has been made but at least it will save you from having to make unnecessary searches on the off-chance a new registration might have been lodged.

Anyone can sign up for a PPSR alert and the service is entirely free of charge.

First go to https://transact.ppsr.gov.au/ppsr/Home

From there, use the menu tab to navigate from Subscriptions to Alert notifications to Create alert notification request as below:

Once there, you’ll be asked to enter (and then re-enter) the email address to which you want your alert to be sent:

If you have a Business to Government link set up (most of you won’t) you can also enter details here to have alerts sent to your B2G mailbox:

Otherwise you can just leave this blank.

You are then prompted to set up a name for your Alert as well as the length of time you want the Alert to remain active – the PPSR will present you with a default name and use the current date as a start date with the alert to run for a year -  this will be fine for most but can easily be amended.

Proceeding to the next page, you’ll then be asked to identify the Grantor on which you want the alert - this will be you if you're checking up on people lodging against you.  

There are a couple of things to note here, firstly, the alert system can only be set up for Grantors that have either an ACN, ARBN or ARSN – which means no alerts can be set up on sole traders, partnerships, trusts, Governmental entities or indeed any organisation without one of those three identifiers.  On the plus side, however, you can add multiple Grantors to the same alert.

Simply choose the relevant identifier (this will usually be the ACN), hit the Verify button to make sure you’ve not made a typo and then Add to place the Grantor on your list of Alert candidates.

Keep doing this until you get bored.

You have now set up your Alert and all that is needed for it to be activated is clicking on Next> at the bottom right of the screen.   

When I first went through this process I was expecting to go to a screen asking me to review all that I’d entered and confirm that I wanted to go ahead and activate the Alert but, although you are taken to a ‘Confirmation’ screen, the Alert has already been set up by this point.

The confirmation email to which the above screen refers arrives promptly and looks as follows:

Keep this email safe or, at least, keep the Alert Notification Request number handy as this acts in tandem with your email address to allow you access to maintain or delete the Alert notification you have set up - as you can see from the below screencap I took when cancelling the Alert notifications I’d set up on the OneSteel companies:

As I said at the outset, the alert the PPSR sends you won’t tell you very much but at least it will act as a prompt to conduct a fresh search if you don’t already have a good idea as to what the new registration might relate to.