A Free 5-Minute Background Check on Any UK Company (Companies House)

Before you sign a contract, extend payment terms, or onboard a supplier in the UK, there is a free background check you can run in about a minute. Everything you need is on the public Companies House register. Most small businesses skip it, not because it is hard, but because they do not know which five things to look at. Here they are, plus how to turn the whole thing into one structured API call when you have more than one company to check. The five things I check on any UK company Status and age. Active is the baseline, but the incorporation date matters too. A six-month-old company asking for 60-day terms is a different risk profile than a fifteen-year-old one. Both are on the register. Are the accounts overdue? This is the single loudest free red flag. UK companies must file annual accounts by a deadline. If they are late, Companies House says so, and it often precedes worse news. Outstanding charges. A charge is a lender's claim on the company's assets (a mortgage, a debenture). The register shows how many are registered and how many are satisfied. Unsatisfied charges tell you who really has a hold on the business. Persons with significant control. The PSC register is who actually owns and controls the company behind the trading name. For KYC and sanctions checks, this is the layer that matters. Insolvency history and officer churn. A history of insolvency proceedings, or directors appointed and resigned in waves, are patterns worth a second look. All of this is at find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk, free, no account. Turning it into a report Checking one company by hand is fine. Checking thirty vendors is an afternoon of clicking, and the register spreads those five things across five different sections per company, with filing descriptions written as codes like appoint-person-director-company-with-name-date. So I built a feed that collapses it into one call per company and, crucially, computes the red flags for you: { "companyName": "BANK OF SCOTLAND PLC", "status": "active", "companyAgeYears": 18.8, "accounts": { "nextDue": "2027-06-30", "overdue": false }, "personsWithSignificantControl": [ { "name": "HBOS PLC", "naturesOfControl": ["ownership-of-shares-75-to-100-percent"] } ], "charges": { "total": 29, "outstanding": 16, "satisfied": 13 }, "riskFlags": ["outstanding-charges:16"] } The riskFlags array is the point. Every flag is a verifiable register fact, not an opinion or a score: accounts-overdue, insolvency-history, outstanding-charges:N, status:dissolved, no-active-officers. You decide what combination is a dealbreaker; the report just makes sure you never miss one. Running it curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/jdepablos~companies-house-feed/run-sync-get-dataset-items?timeout=300" \ -H "Authorization: Bearer $APIFY_TOKEN" \ -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ -d '{ "companies": ["00502851", "Tesco", "SC327000"] }' Numbers or names both work. Pass up to 50 companies, schedule it, and diff the filings between runs to catch new charges or a director resignation the day it happens. Cost $0.005 per company profile delivered. A daily 30-vendor watchlist runs about $4.50 a month. Companies not found are free, and you can bring your own free Companies House API key to use your own rate limit. The feed is here. For the manual version, the five-point list above and the free website cover you.