A clean Companies House search is half a credit check
Somebody asks for thirty day terms. You look them up on Companies House, everything looks normal, and you say yes. That is what most credit checking in small business consists of, and it is missing the part that would have told you.
Companies House does not hold County Court Judgments. It never has. Judgments sit on a separate register run by Registry Trust, searchable per search for a fee.
So a company with tidy filings, a proper registered office and no charges over its assets can be carrying judgments you will never see in anything you looked at. And the person who checked and found nothing does not come away thinking "I have done part of this". They come away thinking they have done it.
The checks that cost nothing
Quite a lot, and it takes about ten minutes. All of this is on the company's own Companies House page:
- Strike-off and insolvency notices. The two that end the conversation.
- Whether accounts or the confirmation statement are overdue. Shown in red on the overview.
- The charges register. Whether a lender already has security, and whether it is a floating charge over everything.
- The PSC register. Who controls the company.
- Filing history. Not just what was filed but when, which is the part worth reading.
- Every director's other appointments. Including the dissolved ones.
The two clicks nobody makes
Click a director's name. You get every company they have been appointed to, live and dead.
One failed company is life. It happens to good people in bad years. Three companies dissolved in the same trade, each owing money, with a new one incorporated shortly after each, is not bad luck. It is a pattern, it is entirely public, it is free, and it is two clicks from the page you already had open.
No credit agency's score shows any of this, and it costs nothing to find.
Read the dates, not just the documents
Filing history rewards looking at it rather than checking a box.
Accounts filed on the last possible day, three years running, is a business with no slack in it. Nothing about that is unlawful and it is not a refusal. It tells you what a slow quarter would do to them, and by extension what it would do to your invoice.
A name change, a new registered office and a new director in the same quarter is a different combination. Each is innocent alone. Together they can be an old company wearing a new coat.
Micro-entity accounts deserve a specific warning: they are perfectly legal, contain no profit and loss and minimal notes, and tell you essentially nothing. Do not read them as reassurance. Read them as an absence of information.
Why this page does not fetch it for you
Partly because it cannot. Everything here runs in your browser and there is no server to make the call from, which is the same reason nothing you type on this site goes anywhere.
But the manual version is genuinely better for this particular job. The value is in looking, because the useful signals are patterns rather than fields. A fetched result would give you a tick where the filing dates were, and the credit agencies who do fetch it sell you a single score with all of it flattened underneath.
Green means nothing showed up
Worth being blunt about, because a green light on a checklist feels like a guarantee and this one is not.
Every check here is historic. It tells you what has already happened to this company, not what is happening inside it this month. Companies stay perfectly filed right up until the week they stop paying, and the filings that would have shown you otherwise appear months later.
What manages the risk is commercial: a credit limit you could afford to lose, staged delivery, payment on account, a deposit, or a personal guarantee where the exposure justifies asking. Those are your calls. This page is the ten minutes of looking that should come before you make them.
Common questions
Can I credit check a company for free?
Most of it, yes. Filing history, whether accounts are overdue, the charges register, the PSC register, strike-off and insolvency notices, and every other company each director has been appointed to are all free to search on Companies House and take about a minute each. What is not free is the County Court Judgment register, which is a separate register run by Registry Trust and charges per search.
Does Companies House show CCJs?
No. County Court Judgments sit on a completely separate register run by Registry Trust, which is exactly where people get caught out. A company can have tidy filings, a real registered office and no charges while carrying judgments that will never appear in anything you looked at on Companies House. Somebody who checked Companies House and found nothing believes they have done a credit check. They have done half of one, and they do not know which half.
What is the most useful free check?
Clicking on a director's name. It shows every other company they have been appointed to, including the dissolved and liquidated ones. One failed company is life. Three dissolved in the same trade, each owing money, is a pattern that tells you exactly what you are looking at. It is two clicks from the page you are already on and almost nobody does it.
Why does this not just fetch the data for me?
Two reasons and only one of them is technical. This site runs entirely in your browser with no server, so it cannot make the calls a lookup would need. But the manual version is also better here, because the value is in looking. Accounts filed on the last possible day three years running is a pattern. A registered office that changed twice in a year is a pattern. A fetched field would flatten both into a tick, and the credit agencies that do fetch it sell you a score that hides exactly this sort of thing.
Do micro-entity accounts tell me anything?
Almost nothing, and reading them as reassurance is a mistake. Micro-entity accounts are entirely legal and contain no profit and loss account and minimal notes. A company filing them is not hiding anything, it is using a filing option available to it. The right conclusion is that you have an absence of information rather than a clean bill of health.
What does a green result actually mean?
That nothing showed up, not that they will pay you. Every check on this list is historic: it tells you what has already happened to the company, not what is happening inside it this month. A business can be perfectly filed right up until the week it stops paying its suppliers. Terms, a credit limit and staged delivery are how you manage that risk, and no checklist replaces them.
Is it worth paying for the CCJ search?
On a large or ongoing credit line, almost certainly. It is a few pounds against an exposure of thousands, and it is the only part of the picture you genuinely cannot see for free. On a one-off invoice for a small amount, going without is a perfectly defensible commercial decision. What is not defensible is not realising you skipped it.