Every UK limited company has to file with Companies House, and almost all of what they file is public and free to read. If a competitor raises money, brings in an investor, borrows against its assets, changes who controls it or moves premises, there is usually a document about it on the register within weeks.

Most people who look at Companies House open the accounts, find they say very little, and never go back. The accounts are the least useful part of the record for a small company. This is a guide to the parts that are worth your time.

Find the right company first

Search the register at find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk. Search by name and you will often get several matches, because trading names and registered names drift apart over the years.

Two ways to make sure you have the right one. Check the registered office address against the one in the footer of their website or in their privacy policy, which usually names the legal entity. Or check the SIC codes on the company profile, which describe what the company says it does.

Watch for groups. A brand you compete with may be a trading name of a holding company with several subsidiaries, and the interesting filings are sometimes on the parent rather than the one you found. If the company profile lists a corporate officer or a corporate person with significant control, follow that name and search it too.

The filing history is where the signal is

On the company profile, open the filing history tab. It is a dated list of every document the company has filed. You can read each one as a PDF for free. These are the ones worth understanding.

Return of allotment of shares (SH01)

Filed when a company issues new shares, which is what normally happens when a company takes investment. It must be filed within a month of the allotment.

The form tells you the number of shares issued, the class, and the amount paid per share including any premium. Multiply the shares by the price and you have a reasonable estimate of what was raised, before any press release exists. It also carries a statement of capital showing the total share structure afterwards, so you can see roughly how much of the company the new money bought.

An SH01 that appears with no announcement anywhere is one of the clearest early signals on the register. Someone has just given that company money to do something.

Confirmation statement (CS01)

Filed at least once a year. It confirms that the information Companies House holds is still correct, and it is the document that carries the shareholder list for most private companies. Compare this year’s against last year’s and you can see who has come in, who has left, and whether the share structure has changed.

The confirmation statement also confirms the SIC codes. A company quietly adding a new SIC code has told you it intends to do something it was not doing before.

Charges

A charge is security given over the company’s assets, usually for a loan or an invoice finance facility. New charges appear in the charges tab with the date and the lender.

Debt finance says something different from equity. A company taking a facility against its receivables is managing cash flow. A company registering a large charge with a bank has committed to repayments, which usually means it expects the revenue to support them.

Charges that are satisfied, meaning repaid and released, are also recorded.

Officer appointments and terminations

Every director appointment and resignation is filed, with the date and the person’s other directorships one click away. A company that appoints a first sales director, or a first finance director, has changed what it is trying to do. A founder resigning as a director in a company that is otherwise trading normally is worth reading twice.

The persons with significant control register shows anyone holding more than 25 per cent of the shares or voting rights. Changes here mean control has moved.

Accounts

Accounts are filed nine months after the year end for a private company, so they are usually stale by the time you see them. They still tell you something. The balance sheet shows cash and net assets at the year end, and the comparative column gives you the year before, so you get direction rather than a single point.

Late accounts are their own signal. Companies House records the filing date and shows overdue accounts on the profile.

What you will not find

For most small companies, the accounts leave out the number everyone wants.

Small and micro companies have been able to file heavily reduced accounts. In practice that often means a balance sheet and a few notes, with no profit and loss account at all. Revenue is not there. Neither is profit, nor anything about what they spend to win a customer.

You also will not find contracts, customers, pricing, headcount by function, or anything about how the business is actually performing between year ends.

This is changing. The Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 removes the option for small companies to file abridged or filleted accounts and will require them to file a profit and loss account. The timing has moved more than once, so check the current position on the Companies House guidance before you plan around it. When it does land, the register becomes considerably more revealing about small competitors than it is now.

Read filings next to everything else

A filing on its own is a fact with no meaning attached. The meaning comes from what sits beside it.

An SH01 for a few hundred thousand pounds is mildly interesting. An SH01 followed six weeks later by four sales roles posted in a city where the company has never sold, and a new page on their site aimed at a market you serve, is a plan you can see in advance. The register gives you the date and the amount. The job board and their own website give you the intent.

That is the habit worth building. When something appears on Companies House, go and look at what the company has been doing publicly in the weeks either side of it.

How often to check, and how to make it bearable

Filings arrive irregularly. Checking daily wastes your time and checking twice a year means you find out after everyone else. Weekly is about right for a handful of companies that genuinely matter to you.

Companies House has a free follow feature. Open a company profile, choose to follow it, and you will get an email when it files anything. That solves the watching problem and creates a new one, because following fifteen companies means fifteen streams of raw documents landing in your inbox with no indication of which ones deserve five minutes of your attention. A confirmation statement with no changes in it looks exactly like a confirmation statement that shows control has moved.

If you only track two or three competitors, the free follow feature and a recurring calendar reminder will do the job.

Where this stops being enough

Companies House is one slow source that stays silent about most of what determines whether a competitor is beating you. It tells you nothing about their pricing, their launches, their hiring, or what their customers are saying. It also covers UK entities only, so a competitor operating here through an overseas parent may barely appear.

Used properly it is still one of the highest signal free sources available on a UK competitor, mostly because so few people bother to read past the accounts.

Meadow reads Companies House filings alongside hiring boards, pricing pages, changelogs and funding news, groups what it finds into one story per company, and emails you a short brief once a week with a live source behind every claim. If that sounds useful, join the waitlist or read more about what we are building.

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Photograph by Sean Pollock on Unsplash.