Companies House is the UK government’s public authority through which UK companies are registered and where annual accounts must be filed. In 2015, the Companies House service was launched which allows annual accounts and other company information to be accessed online for free. This is a great place to start when you’re researching a UK company and want to dig deeper than what is available on the company’s website.
This guide to using Companies House deals with a few basics such as searching based on a company’s registered number, some of the limitations of the existing search function and a few ways that Companies House can be used to understand a company’s operations, its location and its directors and shareholders.
Companies House searching: the basics
The search functionality of Companies House is fairly limited, only allowing searching based on company names, numbers or officers. This may change because, as the url (beta.companieshouse.gov.uk) suggests, the tool is still in beta development.
Searching based on company names is simple enough, although keep in mind that a company may be trading under a different name from the name of the actual registered company. A good way to find a company’s legal name is to check its terms and conditions or privacy policy as these legal documents refer to the company via its proper name.
Terms and conditions and privacy policies are also good places to look for a firm’s registered company number. Many companies also display this number in website footers. It is an alphanumeric string that is eight characters long and unique to each company. It is also known as a Companies House ID (CHID) or a company registration number (CRN).
The number may be comprised of numerals or may have several letters at the start indicating the type of company it is (such a limited liability partnership) or the location of its registered address (SC for Scotland). If you can find the company number, I recommended using this for searching as it ensures you’re looking at the right company. Searching based on company name can be a bit more confusing as unrelated companies can have very similar names, as can companies in the same corporate group.
Finally, you can search based on a company officer’s name. A company officer is an individual who is a director or secretary of a UK company. I find that searching based on an individual’s name tends to have limited utility as Companies House often returns a large number of similarly-named individuals. If you know the year of the person’s birth this can help you to find the right person as you manually scan the results (there is no filter). A better way to find individuals is to search based on a company where you know they are (or have been) an officer and then use the People tab to track them down. More on this in the next section.
Because the search function requires you to known exactly which company or person you are searching for, you cannot search based on a company’s activity or geography. However, there is a technique for searching on these criteria using Google which I detail in the Search workarounds section.
The company page
When you select a company from the search results, it returns an overview of the company including its registered office address, the company type, its latest status, date of incorporation, the due date for its annual accounts and confirmation statement (annual snapshot of the company), and its Standard Industrial Classification (SIC).
Most of these are self-apparent but latest status and SIC merit further mention. The latest status is based on the current operational status of the business as perceived by Companies House and can range from Active to In Administration (there are nine possible statuses).
Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) is a system for industry classification that uses a five-digit code. These codes were last updated in 2007 and are maintained by the Office for National Statistics (ONS). The full framework is available on the ONS’s website. The government also publishes the condensed SIC codes used by Companies House. Activities covered range from mixed farming (01500) to window cleaning services (81221) and publishing of computer games (58210).
The company page has four other tabs besides the Overview. These are Filing history, People, Charges and More. These first three are the most information-rich sections of Companies House and will be covered in more detail below. At the moment, the More tab only provides a link to the Company snapshot, which is the latest 100 entries for a range of criteria such as officers and filing history. This requires that you register an account with Companies House.
Companies House filings
A range of company filings are available via Companies House as viewable pdfs including annual accounts, capital changes, updates to officers’ details, details of mortgages (charges), notices relating to insolvency and administration, and incorporation articles. All can be valuable sources of information on a business depending on the focus of your research.
Annual accounts and the annual return/confirmation statements will be covered in more detail as they are the two most reliable filings and shed the most light on a company’s operations and shareholders.
Annual accounts
As the name implies, these are the accounts that UK companies are required to file annually within a deadline of nine months after a company’s financial year-end. Filing requirements vary considerably depending on the size and type of the company.
There are three categories of companies for filing accounts at Companies House; small, medium and large. There is also a subset of small companies called micro-entities. All of these classifications are based on turnover, number of employees and balance sheet total. Generally, as the size of the company increases, it is required to disclose more financial information. There are also some criteria based on industry, company legal structure or corporate group that dictate which type of accounts must be filed. The government provides detailed guidance on what type of accounts must be filed.
Broadly speaking, there are two categories of company accounts; abridged and full. Micro and small companies file abridged accounts that have a limited balance sheet and do not require a profit and loss statement. Everyone else files full(er) accounts which include a profit and loss statement, balance sheet, a business/strategic review and notes to the financial statements. Detailed thoughts on mining annual reports for information on a company are best saved for another post but reading and understanding a company’s business/strategic review is a good place to start.
Annual return/Confirmation statement
A confirmation statement is a filing that companies must submit every year to notify Companies House to any of changes related to the company’s address, directors or people with significant control (shareholders).
The confirmation statement replaced the annual return filing in 2016. When looking at a company’s filing history, it is worth checking for old annual returns as this filing included a full list of a company’s shareholders which can still be useful information, despite being dated.
Though less useful for a researcher’s purposes, it is still worth keeping an eye on confirmation statements to tell whether a business has undergone changes related to its shares or shareholders. The SH01 filing (return of allotment of shares) is also worth looking at for the same reason.
People
Besides the Filing history tab, the People tab is the most interesting on the company page. It lists the current and previous officers of the company—company directors or secretaries. The individual listings include the date of appointment, nationality and a truncated date of birth (month, year).
The best feature of the page is that you can click on a person’s name to visit a dedicated page that lists every business where they are, or ever have been, an officer. This can be an excellent starting point for coming to grips with an individual’s business history in the UK and how they are connected to others within a particular ecosystem.
Searching workarounds
As noted earlier, Companies House searching functionality is good for looking at a single business but does not allow you to search for groups of businesses based on location or activity. Using Google and search operators, you can approximate some of this functionality.
I’ve written an article about searching the internet better which goes into a little more detail on Google operators. This workaround relies on the using the site: operator to restrict the results to just those on companieshouse.gov.uk.
For example, if you just want to see businesses that are registered at a particular address (like a serviced office or co-working space) you could search for the following site: companieshouse.gov.uk registered office 123 Example St London. The results will include businesses that have the specified addresses on their company’s page. You could also search for director’s based on a correspondence address by using correspondence address in the search terms instead of registered office.
Using this same Google operators technique, you could also search for companies based on any information that is listed on a company page such as SIC codes or directors names.
Companies House for business research
I hope this guide to using Companies House for researching UK companies has been useful. As I’ve described, Companies House does have some limitations related to its searchability but overall it’s a great place to start understanding a company and its key personnel.