Companies House Data – Free and Paid (1/3)

Companies House data is divided into:

A) Basic company information as a free service or,

B) Complex (/Paid) with a monthly fee for more demanding, regular (automated) calls upon the entire data set. Companies House provide great, easy to read, documentation for developers where option B is applicable.

Companies House provide the data in various formats for regular, extended, live/real time data calls, including an XML gateway plus RESTful Application Protocol Interface (API).

The API option provides live, real-time updates, for example, to develop customer alerts to changes. In turn, you better manage risk (debt management) or general business intelligence.

Companies House provide data in a wide range of formats including:

.CSV (zipped) for basic company information (Daily / Monthly). What constitutes basic information can be found on the Company House website

PDF (Word Docs) & iXBRL (Inline eXtensible Business Reporting Language) for Accounting data. What constitutes accounting data can be found at the Companies House website.

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1. Companies House Data, Free product (Company Basic) for United Kingdom & Northern Ireland

The free to use monthly live snapshot of data on the public record is as follows:

• Company type / classification. There are 2-digit prefixes to define the type of company. For instance, a standard UK registered company but classified as overseas e.g. BVI or Cayman Islands would be FC. There are 34 different prefixes for company type (18 company categories). For a full list of company prefixes along with categories, you may refer to the Companies House URI identifier documentation.

• Registered address of the premises. registered address can be the same as or different to the principal trading address. ON many occasions this can also be the address of the company accountants or advisors. It is usually where any assets can be identified in the event of non-payment of business taxes a place where customs officials can seize the assets. The registered address cannot be a P.O. Box address.

• Standard industrial classification (SIC) – the specific nature of the business. In today’s climate there are many new styles of trading, driven technologies emerging that are internet / computer based but may not appear on the list, but at some stage this will be updated e.g. blockchain/AI/Data sales. In this case there are possible options for information services not classified elsewhere, for instance.

SIC Codes are cascading from top domain to subdomains e.g. 6410 where 64 denotes ‘telecommunications’ – broadest classification, but ‘wired telecommunications’ may be 64110 as a sub-classification. Wireless provision a different code.

That company may also resell IT services. They would add a third code to their list. In many cases the data is not always perfectly aligned to the industry, but it is advised to do so for statistical reporting purposes.  Another example might be a healthy & beauty salon where two businesses operate from the same premises but conduct distinctly but complementary services.

In this case Hairdressing & other beauty treatment is classified as 96020. However, if the business model is still beauty as a vertically integration, it may also be horizontally integrated to take on an omnichannel business model. Products & services are sold online & through mail order then the business would have to add additional SIC classification code as follows: 47910 ‘Retail sale via mail order houses or via Internet’.

The data can be used to identified tax fraud, such as artificial separation. If the business is primarily local but a direct competitor in another out of area region/county is called the same thing. All things being even, there is no conflict of interest in using the same name then it may be possible to use the beneficial owners name first, appending it with ‘trading as’ the company name.

Then inspecting the data using sentiment or word analysis can reveal more detail about the data set e.g. how many companies have been incorporated with the word ‘beauty’ in over time.

Naturally, the dataset will mean or be interpreted differently depending on what the desired outcome is. The quality of the data is also of key importance as large swathes of data may be simply be missed if a firm understanding of his characteristics is not well understood.

The Office of National statistics (ONS) is the guardian of the list, providing an interactive hierarchy of the classification which is listed as A-U (x22) where extraterritorial activities are last on the list. Companies House use a condensed version of the list, so it is better to use ONS if at all possible. There are 731 broadband classification types in the companies house list where 99999 is a Dormant Company (not currently trading).

• Company status, such as ‘live’ or ‘dissolved’. A company can be at various stages of the process for cessation or the evolution of the company status can take different paths, for instance the transfer of assets & ownership, receivership or liquidation, etc. There are 32 different status types from Active to ceased/transferred.
• Date of last accounts or confirmation statement filed;
• Date of next accounts or confirmation statement due;
• Previous company names with year from / to;

The data is provided in bulk zipped files. It is generally available on the 5^th day of the month after the relevant previously monthly period for the data extract. It is provided in .csv format. Companies House does have a customer guide .pdf which provides greater detail than we provide here. It is 9 pages long.