Checking out a company at Companies House

[Alan Ambrose]

This is a useful skill - particularly if you’re making a big payment in advance or there’s a long delay between making a payment and receiving the goods or services. Also check out the various threads on getting credit and delivery protection by using credit cards.

Edited Wednesday at 08:41 by Alan Ambrose

[Alan Ambrose]

Firstly, a deal for goods or services is always with a legal entity usually a limited company, PLC or self-employed individual. Occasionally, say for architects, solicitors etc it’s with a partnership. Your purchase is a contract between you (usually a self build individual) and that legal entity. Why’s that important? That’s the entity you need to deal with for complaints, solicitors letters, and say, county court. For an established business, the legal entity will be at the bottom of their website, on their invoices, bottom of their emails etc. These days though we’re often dealing with somewhat unknowns on Facebook etc. If you can’t figure out the legal entity, that’s a big warning sign. Let’s put aside for the moment all entities but limited companies - those are the entities on Companies House, together with PLCs, which we’ll give a pass to for the time being. What we’re trying to do is build up an overall picture and spot any warning signs.

[Alan Ambrose]

OK so we go to ‘find a company’ and search for the company name:

https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk

 

The first big warning sign is if on the overview page:

 

- the company doesn’t exist on the companies house database or is shown as a status of dissolved, proposal to strike off, liquidation, or if we check the filing history and it mentions dormant in any of the recent entries. Anything other than Active and not Dormant is a no.

 

- also check how long the company has been incorporated for and there will be an indicator on the overview page if the company is late with the filing of its accounts or ‘confirmation statement’. A company only a few months old, or one that has overdue filings or that has had lots of changes of name might be a concern. OTOH if they’ve been in business for 20 years we might feel more comfortable.

 

- you might expect for most companies (with perhaps the exception of very large companies) that the registered address (i.e. the one for official correspondence) is the same or close to where you expect the company to be based. For a small company this might be their office address or home address or the address of their accountants or solicitors.

Edited Wednesday at 09:20 by Alan Ambrose

[Alan Ambrose]

Next check the People page and check the box for current officers. These are the directors. There are a few scenarios:

 

+ there are say, half a dozen directors with different surnames. That’s probably a company with a properly constituted board.

 

+ there are 3 or 4 directors and some have the same surname. Probably a family business with a proper board.

 

+ 1 or 2 directors with the same surname. Maybe husband and wife, siblings etc.

 

This is all adding to our background picture.

 

Next dial up persons with significant control. This shows you who are the controlling owners. Again you can usually spot whether we’re dealing with a one-man, family, or larger business and also put names to the owners. That might be useful if you need to raise a complaint or go over the heads of some junior staff.

[Alan Ambrose]

Next check the filing history and look at the last set of filed accounts. See who signed the accounts - that’s usually the boss or maybe the financial director. Also note whether they are listed as full, abridged, or micro-entity which correspond to company size from largest to smallest. These roughly correspond to a turnover of <£36m, <£10m and <£600k. A smaller a company is, often the risker it is as it has less resilience.

Now for a quick look at the numbers. We’ll just do a quick glance to start with. Don’t be intimidated, we don’t need to understand every number.

 

Find the balance sheet and the line total shareholders funds and also the two lines above usually share capital and profit & loss or retained earnings. These will be listed for the most recent and the preceding year for comparison.

These give, first off, an indication of size. Does it have say £100, 10k, 100k, 1m or 10m of share capital (initial capital that the owners put into the business)? Each represents a different scenario and a different level of risk for you. Has it built up a healthy level of retained earnings through the years? Is the retained earnings decreasing i.e. did they make a loss last year? Compare the amount of cash you’re thinking or risking as an up front payment with the shareholders funds. If you’re less than 1% say, then you’re probably safe. If you’re, say 50% then you’re a big customer for them and at risk.

 

Then look at the cash number. Is it big and increasing? Decreasing? Virtually no cash in the bank? It’s the cash level (or the lack of it) which is the trigger for liquidation and risk to customer’s (i.e. your) funds.

[Alan Ambrose]

The bigger companies will also have a Profit & Loss statement or P&L. The smaller ones won’t.

 

If there is one, just observe (in the last line of the statement) whether the company is making a profit or loss and whether it is increasing or decreasing. Losses (usually shown with brackets round them e.f. (X,XXX) ) and to a lesser extent decreasing profits are a warning sign.

 

So, to recap, we should have built up an overall picture. We might have major warnings e.g. company in liquidation, general warnings (low cash, decreasing profits, losses) or queries (e.g. doesn’t seem to be based where we thought they were). We might be comforted e.g. old family business, with plenty of cash and a consistent record of profits. At least you will have gained some information to help your judgement, in negotiating terms, or knowing who to deal with if there’s a problem. You’ll also come across as informed when dealing with the salespeople, which might set the right tone for your relationship.

 

There are people who make careers out of this analysis, so there’s more depth which we probably don’t need.

 

Please feel free to add your thoughts, comments, questions, tips, experiences etc.

[Benpointer]

Brilliant!  Thanks Alan.  

 

(Should be a pinned thread maybe?)

[Gus Potter]

What a great piece of advice from @Alan Ambrose

 

Now the next question is how do you find the right SE / Architect / Designer.

 

I'm an SE /  Architectural designer, to be honest I started out as a local builder, went to uni.. learnt about SE stuff. When I look back my education gave me the tools to teach myself.. and that changed my life.