How to read a UK company’s Companies House record

Every limited company in the UK has a public record at Companies House, and it is free for anyone to read. It holds the company’s accounts, its filing history, and details of its directors, and together they tell you a great deal about how a business is doing and how well it is run. The difficulty is that the record is written for accountants and administrators rather than for the person trying to make sense of a company. This guide walks through the main parts of a Companies House record and explains, in plain terms, what each one is actually telling you.

Before going through the sections, it helps to know what you are trying to get out of the record. Most people looking up a company want to answer a practical question: is this business sound, is it well run, and can I rely on it? Nearly all of that can be read from three parts of the record: the accounts, the filing history, and the director information. The rest is useful context, but those three carry the weight.

The company overview

The top of a company’s record gives you the basics: its registered name, company number, registered office address, incorporation date, company type, and status. The status is worth checking first, because it tells you whether the company is active, dormant, or in the process of being dissolved or struck off. An active company is trading normally; a dormant one is registered but not currently trading; and a company marked for strike off or in liquidation is one to treat with caution. The incorporation date tells you how long the business has existed, which is a rough guide to how established it is, though age alone is not a measure of health.

The accounts: where financial health lives

The accounts are the most important part of the record for judging whether a company is financially sound. They are filed once a year, and for most small companies they consist of a balance sheet, which sets out what the company owns against what it owes. One thing to expect: most small UK companies file under the small companies exemption, which means they lodge only a balance sheet and keep the profit and loss account off the public record. So for many companies there will be no revenue or profit figure at all, and that is normal rather than a sign of anything hidden.

What you can read from the balance sheet is more useful than a profit figure anyway. The net assets figure, the difference between everything the company owns and everything it owes, tells you whether it is solvent: positive means it owns more than it owes, negative means the reverse and is a warning sign. The current assets and current liabilities tell you whether it can cover its bills over the coming year. These are the readings that tell you whether a company is financially stable, and they are on the balance sheet whether or not a profit figure is filed.

The filing history: a record of behaviour

The filing history lists everything the company has filed and when, from accounts and confirmation statements to changes of director or address. It is more revealing than it first appears, because how a company files is a signal in itself. A business that files its accounts and confirmation statements on time, year after year, tends to be well run and in control of its affairs. A pattern of late filings, overdue accounts, or gaps is often an early sign of a company under strain, since filing tends to slip when a business is in trouble. So the filing history is worth reading not just for what was filed, but for whether it was filed on time.

The confirmation statement, filed annually, is the company confirming its basic details are up to date. It is not a financial document, but a company that has stopped filing its confirmation statement is one that may have stopped paying attention to its obligations, which is worth noting.

The directors: who runs the business

The people section of the record lists the company’s directors and, where relevant, the persons with significant control, the individuals who ultimately own or control the business. For each director you can see when they were appointed, and by looking at their record you can see what other companies they are or have been involved with. Stable, long-serving directors with no troubling history are reassuring. Directors who have been disqualified, or who have a trail of dissolved or insolvent companies behind them, are worth weighing more carefully. As a signal, the director record is best used to support the picture the accounts are painting rather than to stand on its own.

Reading two years, not one

One habit worth adopting is to read the last two years of accounts rather than just the latest. A single set of accounts is a snapshot, but two shows a trend: whether net assets are growing or shrinking, whether the company is taking on more debt, whether its position is strengthening or weakening. A company can show acceptable figures in a single year while sliding, and only the comparison reveals it. For any judgement that matters, the trend is often more telling than the latest number alone.

Putting it together

Read together, these parts of the record answer most of what you would want to know about a company. The status tells you it is active and trading. The accounts tell you whether it is solvent and can meet its bills. The filing history tells you whether it is well run. The director record tells you who is behind it. And two years of accounts tell you which way it is heading. None of it requires training, only knowing what each part means and taking the time to read it.

The whole record is public and free; the value is not in finding it but in knowing how to read it.

That last point is the catch. The record is free and open, but reading it well, and reading it the same way every time, takes knowledge and time that not everyone has to spare. This is what CompanyIQ is built to do: it reads a company’s Companies House record, interprets the accounts, checks the filing history and directors, and turns the whole thing into a clear, scored summary. If you would like the record read and explained for you rather than working through it yourself, you can try it at company-iq.co.uk.

For a closer look at judging financial health specifically, see our guide to how to check if a company is financially stable.