Free, practical guides to Companies House records, filing history, credit risk and director research — written for people who have to make a call this week.
Most bad business decisions are not caused by missing information. They are caused by information nobody looked at. Every UK company files a public record: registration details, accounts, confirmation statements, charges, and the people behind it. Read together, those records tell you what the company is, what it owes, and how reliably it behaves.
BusinessChecks explains how to read that record quickly, without a subscription and without an accountancy background.
Company number, registered office, filing history, accounts and charges — the full walkthrough.
How to research the people behind a company, including prior insolvencies and disqualifications.
Reading accounts for warning signs before you extend credit or agree payment terms.
Corrections, questions, or a record you think we have read wrong.
When you agree to supply goods on 30-day terms, you are lending money. The company's filed accounts tell you whether it can pay, how quickly it collects, and whether it has security already registered against its assets. That is not privileged information. It is published, free, and most people never open it.
The same applies to hiring, partnering, or taking a contract from a company you have not dealt with before. A fifteen-minute check of the public record removes most of the surprise.
Companies House, the UK's registrar of companies, which publishes registration, filing, accounts, charges and director information free of charge.
Yes. You are reading a public register that exists specifically to be read. The data is published for exactly this purpose.
No. The underlying records are free. Paid tools add monitoring and alerts, which matter if you check the same companies repeatedly.