COMPANIES HOUSE

COMPANIES HOUSE DOCUMENTS 2013 Review of Providers

One provider offers unlimited access to Companies House documents for just ÂŁ30 a year. Is this too good to be true?

Companies House Documents Documents filed at Companies House contain a wealth of primary information on British and Irish companies. But until the turn of the century, accessing that information meant time-consuming visits to the local Companies House or the retention of a search agency to perform the task.

Users now are in the fortunate position of having Companies House documents available instantly 24/7 from a wide range of providers.

These providers are now offering a variety of highly competitive pricing models; it’s now possible to get accounts of private British and Irish companies free, or unlimited access to all Companies House filings for just £30 per year!

For anyone purchasing lots of company documents the wealth of providers presents an opportunity to make substantial savings.

It also presents another problem – which provider to use?

This report examines the key providers with an emphasis on the newer entrants. It also casts a look at other company registries around the British Isles including one which charges up to £12 for a document!

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Companies House Documents

Background British companies have been required to file vital information about themselves at Companies House for about 170 years, helping make the country a transparent place in which to do business.

These filings provide extensive historical information on a company. Often the accounts will provide details of strategy, market intelligence and revenue splits.

Documents filed at Companies House can be monitored and late filing of documents can often provide an early warning of a company’s financial difficulties.

Companies House is headquartered in Cardiff. The Cardiff office also processes company information for companies registered in England and Wales.

Companies registered in Northern Ireland and Scotland are processed by its local offices in Belfast and Edinburgh.

Companies House Companies House itself offers two online solutions. WebCHeck is a pay-as-you-go service with documents charged at £1 each, payable by credit card. Its sister service Companies House Direct provides a monthly payment facility at £4pm with documents again costing £1 each. A monthly invoice is issued and payment collected by direct debit.

Organisations seeking to replace Companies House with a third party provider should still consider retaining access to Companies House. It highlights companies who have filed their accounts late, and the actual date that accounts are received at Companies House. Many third party providers just list the company’s year end in place of the date received and late filing of accounts tends not to be so obvious either.

Companies House also contains useful outline details for entities which file elsewhere. Such entities include foreign companies, and mutual companies.

These are identified by company numbers prefixed by FC, IP and SP.

Companies House Web Services Service

Pricing

Comments

WebCHeck

Free: Basic company information, filing dates, email alerts of filings, details of disqualified directors, insolvency history.

Designed for ad hoc access.

Payment by credit card or Paypal.

www.companieshouse.gov.uk

Documents eg accounts £1 each.

Companies House Direct

As WebCHeck except there is an additional monthly service charge of £4.

Designed for corporate access.

Payment is by monthly direct debit.

Free. Contains basic company information like WebCHeck but no chargeable services can be accessed through it.

Works on iPhone, iPad and Android devices. Check models on website.

www.companieshouse.gov.uk Companies House Mobile Available in iTunes store and Google play store

Companies House Documents

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Smaller Business Solutions The last few years have seen the emergence of new providers focused on serving smaller businesses. They are characterised by a “freemium” business model, explicit pricing plans, login options via social media, onsite advertising, visual presentation of key data and the adoption of crowdsourcing techniques to add additional data like phone numbers and websites.

The best known provider in this market is venture capital-backed Duedil, short for due diligence. Established by entrepreneur Damian Kimmelman and based in London’s Soho, it states its service is aimed at the 80% of the market not served by the large providers. Its annual subscription of £250 gives one user unlimited access to Companies House documents, 180 credit reports and 600 exports into Excel. Its monthly membership fee of £25 provides 500 documents, 50 Excel exports and 15 credit reports.

Setting aside the credit reports, its monthly fee of £25 provides up to 500 Companies House filings making each document a very reasonable 5p when compared to Companies House’s rate of £1. It also has some interesting social features including the ability to like companies and to see your LinkedIn connections at the companies you are looking at.

Duedil has recently extended its data set for its API to include company and director details from 20 European countries including France, Germany and Switzerland. If it were able to make filings from these countries available online through its regular desktop service, it would be a real step forward in transparency.

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Companies House Documents

Challenger brand Duedil offers interesting social features including the ability to view your LinkedIn connections at a company and to comment on a company.

A very small provider with a low profile and even lower price is Bedfordshire-based Bizzy. Founded by computer programmer Peter Chapman in 2007, it offers unlimited access to Companies House documents for an annual subscription of just £29.99 per year. Too good to be true? A search on Duedil estimates the company’s turnover is currently less than £100k so you are not going to have the support of a large organisation. If you access the service via an API, you are limited to a download of ten documents per hour within that pricing plan. And unlike its peers, it does not offer Irish documents. But at the price who’s complaining?

Despite Bizzy guaranteeing that all searches and purchases are confidential, there is a panel labelled “Others are viewing” which seems to contradict this statement and may be a problem for those working on sensitive matters.

Bizzy does have some neat features which are well implemented. It has a great company overview page which lists the directors’ other directorships and benchmarks the company against its national and local peers.

For those looking for a package to include credit reports as well, the cost for these is £229 per year. Bizzy also provides Android and iPhone apps.

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What can possibly be cheaper than £30 per year? Free! If you’re only interested in a company’s accounts and won’t use more than 100 a month, then Company Check may well suit your needs.

Founded in 2009 and acquired last year by Nordic credit report company Credit Safe, the company offers up to 100 British and Irish company accounts free each month. There is a slight catch – the accounts are not available instantly but are instead emailed to you.

Company Check states that this will be within the hour. In practise we found it near instant, but we did have to flag Company Check as a verified email address to prevent documents going into the spam folder.

increased allowance of 500 sets of accounts is included in the Pro subscription and an unlimited number are included in the Pro Annual subscription. The company’s business is more focused on the provision of credit rating information hence its document charges.

Company Check’s nill subscription option still gives access to 100 sets of annual accounts each month, both British and Irish. Like Duedil, it surfaces key data in easy-to-read graphs.

Company Check also offers two subscription accounts: Pro which lasts for 30 days and costs £20 whilst Pro Annual costs £200. However, the subscriptions do not include access to filings which are charged at a reduced rate of 99p.

Smaller Business Solutions Service and website

Pricing

Bizzy

Annual subscription of £29.99 provides unlimited access.

Nill subscription: Up to 100 annual accounts are free, other documents £1.99.

www.bizzy.co.uk Company Check www.companycheck.co.uk Duedil

www.duedil.com

Alerting? Republic

Comments

Yes

No

Also offers a free mobile app.

Pro subscription £20pm. Up to 500 annual accounts are free, Yes other documents 99p.

Yes

Company’s focus is on credit scoring.

Yes

Payable by credit card only.

Pro Annual subscription £200.

Unlimited annual accounts, other documents 99p. Basic service: £1.99 per document.

Monthly membership: £24.99 gives 50 documents. Annual membership of £249.99 gives unlimited documents.

of Ireland documents

Yes

Pricing plans also include some access to credit reports and ability to export financials into Excel.

Companies House Documents

5

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Corporate Solutions The corporate market lacks the pricing transparency of the smaller business market, with charges frequently determined on a per company basis. Providers serving this market have concentrated on tailoring their service to clients, the provision of the means to recharge costs, the speed in which to find and download documents and the reliability of their platforms.

For those organisations which need to use Companies House Direct as their primary resource but require customisation, 7Side meets this need. It offers tailored Companies House Direct access at £20pm with extra features including mandatory references for recharging, weekly usage reports and instant response. Companies House documents are charged at £1 per document.

Traditional markets report provider Key Note now provides a full image bank

Pricing for large volume usage has generally moved away from a per-document basis to a flat fee dependent upon the organisation’s size. Suppliers like Perfect Information, D&B with its MyICC and RM Group with ARMadillo have made a huge success of the large corporate market.

Perfect Information’s recent efforts have been to focus on the ability to download pre-set document packages, thereby saving users time and standardising processes across large organisations.

As well as these suppliers, Key Note, a traditional provider of market reports is now bundling in unlimited access to Companies House filings together with credit reports as part of its annual subscription. Other companies like OneSource do provide recent annual returns and accounts. What marks Key Note out from these is that it is supplying a full Companies House image bank.

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Companies House Documents

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Corporate Solutions Service and website

Pricing

Alerting?

Republic of Ireland documents

Comments

Experian Corpfin Document Images

Corporate subscription

Yes

Yes

Experian is a credit giant like D&B which has moved into the images market through its Corpfin division.

No

No

www.keynote.co.uk

Unlimited access to market reports, company reports and Companies House documents included in annual subscription.

Key Note is a traditional publisher of market reports aimed at commercial and academic organisations.

It now includes full Companies House records and company reports as part of its subscription service.

My ICC from D&B www.icc.co.uk

Corporate subscription

Yes

Yes

ICC is owned by credit giant D&B.

Perfect Information PI Private Company Data www.perfectinfo.com

Corporate subscription

Yes

Yes

Also operates extensive overseas documents ordering service.

RM aRMadillo

Adhoc users: £2.50 per document.

Yes

No

Also offers a free mobile app with access to basic company information but cannot obtain images from it.

Access to Yes Companies House Direct. Documents charged at £1 each. £20pm subscription service gives valueadded features.

No

Value-added features include training, instant response, mandatory references, weekly usage reports and monthly invoices.

Also operates extensive overseas documents ordering service.

www.experian.com.uk Key Note

www.rmonline.com

7Side

www.7side.co.uk

Companies House Documents

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Other Registries Alongside Companies House, neighbouring countries offer similar services. But not all provide the same level of information nor is it offered at such reasonable prices.

Guernsey does not offer company accounts and those documents it does offer are charged at £2 each.

Irish company documents are to be found on many third party products but can also be obtained directly for €2.50 each.

For countries further afield, the EBR via its UK and Ireland agents GBR Direct provides access to company documents from many European countries and some US states on a pay-as-you-go-basis. However, prices are not particularly cheap and users may prefer to go directly to the individual registries or use their regular supplier who can meet their needs for every country. Individuals or the more adventurous can seek out overseas registries using this link: http://www.companieshouse.gov.uk/links/in troduction.shtml. Also useful is the D&B international database which can be accessed for no cost at the top right-hand side of the D&B website www.dnb.com.

UK mutual companies are looked after by the Financial Conduct Authority which inherited the registry from the Financial Services Authority. Documents have only been online since 2011 and each document costs an expensive £12.

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Companies House Documents

We hope that the authority considers outsourcing this function to Companies House which should result in documents being widely available and far cheaper or removes the charges for online documents.

The current set-up may well deter people from finding out key information about mutual companies and thereby making their operations less transparent; quite the opposite of a regulator’s remit. Those seeking a mutual company’s recent accounts should be able to find them on its website but will unlikely to find other filings or those of a company’s subsidiaries.

The Financial Conduct Authority manages the Mutual Public Register but charges a hefty £12 per document.

Although not strictly companies, charities are required to file information with their regulator, the Charity Commission. Annual reports and accounts for charities with an income over £25,000 are available free on the Commission’s website, an approach which we welcome. The Charity Register also surfaces key financial data visually on each charity helping to simplify research on the sector.

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Other Registries Service and website

Documents available

Document costs

Annual accounts and trustees Free annual reports available for all http://www.charitycommission.gov.uk/find charities registered in England and Wales with annual income -charities/ over £25,000.

Register of Charities

No accounts, full annual returns, mem and arts, incorporation documents.

£2.00

Accounts, full annual returns, mem and arts, incorporation documents.

€2.50

Accounts, full annual returns, mem and arts, incorporation http://www.gov.im/ded/pvi/pvi_fr.html?m documents. enuid=21707

£1.15

Guernsey Registry http://www.guernseyregistry.com/ Republic of Ireland Companies Registration Office http://www.cro.ie/ Isle of Man

Jersey Financial Services Commission

http://www.jerseyfsc.org/registry/ UK Mutual Companies Register https://mutuals.fsa.gov.uk/

GBR Direct – European Business Register www.gbrdirect.eu

Accounts (sometimes), annual return of shareholders only, mem and arts, incorporation documents.

£2.00

Online documents available from 2011 including annual return, annual accounts and complete amendment to rules.

Older documents available to order offline.

£12.00

GBR is the UK & Ireland agent for the European Business Register which provides access to registries in Europe and the USA.

Priced in Euros per document or package of documents. Documents seem to be more expensive than Companies House eg annual accounts are about £3.50.

Companies House Documents

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Prices quoted were correct at date of research in June 2013 and exclude VAT when this is charged.

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