Blog
Thoughts on UK company intelligence, financial analysis, and building CompanyIQ.
Can you predict company failure from filed accounts? We tested 100.
We took 100 UK companies that went into insolvency on a single day and scored the last active accounts. 81 were already showing serious warning signs.
Practical guides
How to read the public record yourself, for a specific decision.
How to check a UK company before trading with it
What to check at Companies House before you trade with a UK company: whether it is registered and active, what its filing history says about it, what the accounts show, and who is behind it.
How to read company accounts filed at Companies House
How to read a UK company’s accounts filed at Companies House: the balance sheet line by line, net assets, the current ratio, and what filleted accounts can still tell you.
Commercial tenant vetting checklist
A practical checklist for vetting a commercial tenant before you sign a lease, covering the company checks, the financial protections, and what to ask the applicant directly.
Bad debt prevention for UK B2B businesses
How UK businesses owed money by other businesses can prevent bad debt before it happens, by vetting customers properly, setting terms to match the risk, and acting early when one starts to slip.
How to check if a UK company is legitimate
How to check whether a UK company is legitimate before you deal with it, using the public record.
How to read a UK company’s Companies House record
How to read Companies House accounts and the rest of a UK company’s record, covering what the filed accounts, filing history, and director information tell you.
How to vet a commercial tenant before you sign a lease
What to look for when vetting a company as a commercial tenant: the financial checks from filed accounts, plus the practical ones, from what the business does to the references worth taking.
Supplier risk assessment checklist for UK companies
A practical supplier risk assessment checklist for UK companies. Covers the financial and risk checks from Companies House filings that tell you whether a supplier is stable enough to rely on.
What a strike off notice means if you deal with the company
What a strike off notice is, what it means when a customer or supplier receives one, and why the financial trouble behind it is usually visible in the accounts long before the notice appears.
How to check if a company is financially stable
How to tell whether a UK company is financially stable and safe to trade with, reading the signs of trouble from the public record.
How to check a company before extending credit
How to assess a UK company before you offer it credit terms, using nothing but the public record.
How to assess a company that files no profit figure: a worked example
A real UK company that files no profit and loss account, and a real CIQ Score of 78. A worked example of making a sound credit decision from the balance sheet alone, when there is no profit figure to fall back on.
How to qualify a UK company before the first sales call
A way to qualify a UK company in about a minute, using a single report from Companies House data. Read the score, scan four signals, and decide which prospects are worth your time before you pick up the phone.
How to assess a company that doesn't file a profit and loss account
Most small UK companies file no profit and loss account. Here is what to read on the balance sheet instead.
How to analyse a UK company before you extend credit: a worked example
A real UK company, real filed accounts, and a real CIQ Score. What the raw data showed and what the analysis concluded.
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Worked examples and analysis
Real companies, real scores, and what the accounts showed.
The first 100+ CompanyIQ analyses. Here is what the data shows.
We have now run more than 100 company analyses through CompanyIQ. The average CIQ Score is 54. Here are the patterns that have emerged.
CompanyIQ Insights: what our platform data shows about UK companies
We built a public intelligence page that aggregates everything CompanyIQ sees across the companies it analyses. Here is what the data looks like right now, and why it gets more valuable over time.
About CompanyIQ
Why it exists and how it is built.
Why I built CompanyIQ
After fifteen years in data work I kept seeing the same problem: companies invest time qualifying who they deal with, and reach different conclusions every time. This is why I built CompanyIQ.
We ran the Elite Business 100 through CompanyIQ. Here is what the data shows.
We analysed 50 companies from the Elite Business 100 using CompanyIQ. The average CIQ Score was 54. Here is what the data shows.
Why your company checks are probably less reliable than you think
Most businesses have a process for checking who they work with. The question is whether that process is as reliable as it needs to be.
Introducing CompanyIQ
What CompanyIQ is, why we built it, and what we hope it becomes.
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Sign up, claim your free credit, and see what an intelligent company check looks like.
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