Why CompanyIQ
Why CompanyIQ
The short version
Most tools present the Companies House data in a nice way and leave you to interpret it. We analyse the accounts and give you the interpretation: a scored intelligence report on a company’s financial health and risk, with the reasoning and warning signs laid out, in 60 to 90 seconds. You get an analyst’s conclusion without having to be one.
Most company tools
CompanyIQ
Data is not the same as an answer
The information at Companies House is public and free, and anyone can look at it. The difficulty isn’t getting the data; it's reading it. A set of filed accounts is written for accountants, most small companies file no profit figure at all, and knowing whether a current ratio or a net asset position is a problem takes knowledge not everyone has. So a tool that simply shows you the filings, however cleanly, has moved the data from one screen to another without answering the question you came with. We start where those tools stop, by reading the accounts and telling you what they mean.
A scored judgement, not a page of figures
At the centre of what we do is the CIQ Score, a rating from 0 to 100 that reflects a company’s financial health, filing compliance, director quality, market position, and risk. It is not a number lifted from somewhere else and reprinted; it is produced by actually analysing the filed accounts across those dimensions, with the reasoning shown. Alongside the score you get the warning signs, the balance-sheet readings, and a clear summary of what the accounts say about the business. So instead of a page of figures to interpret, you get a verdict you can act on, with the evidence behind it.
An analyst’s conclusion, without being an analyst
The point of interpreting the accounts for you is that most people checking a company are not financial analysts, and should not have to be. A credit controller, a supplier, a landlord, or a salesperson needs to know whether a company is sound, not to spend an afternoon learning to read a balance sheet. We give a non-analyst an analyst’s conclusion: the judgement an experienced reader of accounts would reach, produced in 60 to 90 seconds, in language anyone can act on.
Backed by evidence, and tested
A judgement is only worth as much as the reasoning behind it, so every score and warning sign we produce cites the figure in the accounts it came from. You can always see why a company scored the way it did. And the approach has been tested against reality: when we scored 100 UK companies that had gone into insolvency, most were already showing clear warning signs on the last accounts they filed while still trading, the distress visible in the public record long before the end. You can read that study in can you predict company failure from filed accounts.
Everyone else shows you the data. CompanyIQ tells you what it means.
When a data tool is enough, and when it is not
None of this means presenting the raw filings has no value. If you are comfortable reading accounts yourself and simply want quick access to the underlying data, a tool that lays it out cleanly does the job. We built CompanyIQ for the times when you want the answer rather than the raw material: when you need to judge a company quickly, when the person making the decision is not an accountant, or when you want a consistent, scored assessment every time, at scale, rather than relying on your own reading. If that is the job you need done, reading and interpreting the accounts is exactly what we built. You can see the approach in practice in our guide to how to check if a company is financially stable.
See what it tells you
Run your first company check free, and see the difference between data and a judgement.
Run a company check