Companies House data for prospecting: what it tells you

Companies House data for prospecting is one of the few genuinely free, genuinely reliable checks available before you email a business you have never dealt with. Every limited company registered in the UK has a public record: incorporation date, registered office, SIC code, filing history and current status. None of it requires a login, a subscription or guesswork. Most freelancers and small agencies never look at it before sending a cold email, which is a missed step, because a two-minute check on Companies House can stop you wasting an email on a business that stopped trading eight months ago.

What the record actually shows

Search a company name on the Companies House register and you get a handful of facts that matter a lot more than they first look. The incorporation date tells you how long the business has actually existed as a legal entity, which is useful context if the website says “established 2010” but the company was only registered eighteen months ago, sometimes a rebrand, sometimes a change of ownership, occasionally something less straightforward. The registered office address is not always the trading address, a lot of small companies use an accountant's office for this, so it is not a reliable way to confirm a business actually operates in the town you found it in. The SIC code is a rough classification of what the company does, and it is worth a glance because it occasionally flags a business that has diversified well beyond what its website or Google listing suggests.

The one check that actually saves you time: company status

The single most useful field is status. A company can be active, active but with overdue accounts or a confirmation statement, in the process of being struck off, dissolved, or in some form of insolvency. An active company with everything filed on time tells you nothing alarming either way. Overdue accounts on an otherwise active company is not necessarily a red flag, plenty of small businesses file at the last legal moment, but it is worth noting alongside everything else you find. A company already dissolved, or with a strike-off notice pending, is the one that matters: it means there is very likely nobody left to reply to your email, whatever the website or Google Business Profile still shows. Sites and social pages can sit online for years after a business has actually closed, so this is one of the few ways to catch that before you spend time writing a personalised pitch to nobody.

Why this matters more for some prospects than others

This check earns its place most on businesses that already looked borderline before you got to Companies House: a website with a copyright date several years old, a Google listing with no recent reviews, contact details that bounce. Combined with those signals, a dissolved status confirms what you already suspected rather than introducing new doubt. It is the same instinct covered in reading the signs of a website nobody maintains, an untouched website is a clue, not proof, and the Companies House record is often the fastest way to turn a clue into a fact one way or the other before you commit to an email.

What it doesn't tell you

It is worth being precise about the limits, because it is easy to over-read this data. Sole traders and ordinary partnerships are not required to register with Companies House at all, so a huge share of the small local businesses worth prospecting, a mobile hairdresser, a jobbing builder, a market trader, will simply have no record to find. Absence from the register is not a warning sign, it is the normal state for most sole traders. Trading names rarely match registered company names exactly either: the shop sign says one thing, the company behind it is registered under a different name, sometimes a parent company covering several local branches. Search by the name on the website or shopfront first, and only treat a blank result as meaningful once you have also tried the obvious variations.

Using it as one input, not a verdict

None of this replaces actually looking at the business. Company status tells you whether there is likely to be anyone home, it does not tell you whether the website is slow, whether the contact form works, or whether the business genuinely needs a new site rather than a small fix. Those are still questions for an actual audit, the kind covered in a website audit checklist for agencies. Companies House data is best treated as a filter you run before that work, a fast way to remove the businesses not worth auditing at all, rather than as evidence for what to say in the email itself.

Where this fits into prospecting properly

Checking Companies House by hand for every business found in a search is realistic for a handful of prospects and tedious well before fifty. Patchscout attaches Companies House data to every business it finds automatically, alongside the website audit, speed, SEO, mobile, SSL and the site builder detected, so a dissolved or struck-off company is visible before you spend any time on it rather than after you have already sent an email. The three free searches at app.patchscout.co.uk/signup are enough to see how much of a trade's search results turn out to be businesses worth crossing off the list before you start.