What Companies House and HMRC data can add to a UK prospecting workflow

What to take away

What Companies House filings actually give a prospecting workflow

Companies House is the UK's official register of limited companies, limited liability partnerships and other incorporated bodies. Every active company files a confirmation statement at least once a year and annual accounts. Most also file updates when directors change, when a registered office moves, or when the company is dissolved.

For a prospecting workflow, the register gives you four things: a legal name, a company number, a registered office address, and a status. Status is the most underrated field. A company marked as active is trading, or at least has not told the registrar otherwise. A company marked as liquidation, receivership or dissolved is not a safe target.

Company filings also include director names and appointment dates. That helps you find the right person rather than guessing a generic inbox. It does not give you email addresses, phone numbers or consent to contact anyone.

Filings are dated. A confirmation statement filed in January may describe a company that has since moved office or changed directors. Treat the date on the filing as part of the data, not metadata. A record with no date is a record you cannot trust.

Companies House data is free at the point of access through its public search. The Companies House developer hub also offers a free REST API for pulling name, number, status and filing history into a CRM once you register an application key. The paid Companies House Streaming API pushes filing events to your own endpoint as they happen.

For a UK prospecting workflow, the free tier is enough to verify a shortlist. Bulk data is for teams that need to match thousands of records against a CRM.

One practical limit: Companies House covers incorporated entities. Sole traders, partnerships and many charities do not appear in the same way. If your market includes tradespeople or professional partnerships, the register will miss them.

A useful habit is to store the company number on every CRM record. When a name changes, the number stays. That single field prevents duplicate accounts and makes later enrichment cheaper. It also gives your team a stable key when you compare records against other public sources such as the four data sources behind England's prospecting market size.

Reading SIC codes and company status for firmographic targeting

SIC codes are the standard industrial classification codes that UK companies use to describe their business activity. A company can list up to four. The first is treated as the primary activity. Codes range from agriculture to web portals, and they are the simplest way to build a target list by sector.

SIC code targeting works when you use it as a filter, not a fact. A marketing agency may code itself under advertising, management consultancy or software publishing. A holding company may carry the code of its largest subsidiary. Read the code alongside the company name and website, not on its own.

The ONS publishes a breakdown of UK businesses by industry, size and location that helps you sanity-check whether a sector is big enough to target. If your niche SIC code has fewer than a few hundred companies nationally, a broad campaign will exhaust the list quickly.

The ONS business activity and location data is the reference point most analysts use.

Company status is the second filter. Active is the default. Active proposal to strike off is a warning: the company has filed late or stopped responding, and may be dissolved soon. Dissolved means the entity no longer exists. Liquidation means an insolvency practitioner is involved.

For firmographic targeting, combine SIC code with size proxies. Companies House does not publish employee counts, but it does publish accounts. Small companies often file abridged accounts, which reveal little. Larger companies file full accounts with turnover and employee numbers. Those filings are the closest thing to firmographic data UK teams get for free.

A second useful field is the accounts filing date. A company that has filed on time for five years is more likely to be a stable buyer than one with a history of late filings. Late filing is not proof of trouble, but it is a pattern worth scoring.

Use SIC codes to build segments, then use status and filing history to remove risk. That order matters. If you filter by status first, you will exclude companies that are merely late, not failing. If you filter by SIC first, you keep a larger pool and can score the rest.

Store the SIC code as a field, not a tag. Tags get messy. A field lets you count, compare and refresh. It also lets you see when a company changes its primary code, which is often a signal that it has pivoted or been acquired.

Using HMRC VAT registration data as a buying signal

HMRC is the official source on VAT, payroll and business obligations. VAT registration is a strong signal that a company has crossed the threshold where it must charge VAT on its sales.

You can register for VAT voluntarily below the threshold, and you must register once your taxable turnover passes it. The Register for VAT guidance sets out the current process and thresholds.

The threshold is £90,000 of taxable turnover over the previous 12 months, or the figure you expect to pass in the next 30 days. It rose from £85,000 on 1 April 2024. Keep the number in a field rather than a note, because the government reviews it at Budget.

A VAT number on a website or invoice tells you the company is registered. Treat it as one signal among several.

Where VAT data helps most is in segmentation. A registered company is more likely to have formal finance processes, a finance contact and a purchasing workflow. That makes it a better fit for software with a monthly subscription than a cash-only business.

The VAT number itself is also a useful matching key. If two CRM records share a VAT number, they are likely the same trading entity under different names. That catches duplicate accounts that company name matching misses.

You can check a VAT number through HMRC's online service, the Check a UK VAT number tool on GOV.UK. The check confirms whether the number is valid and what name it is registered to. It does not return turnover, employee count or contact details. Any vendor promising that is overstating what the register holds.

For teams building a prospecting software demand signals model, VAT registration is a lagging indicator. A company registers when it grows, not before. It confirms a stage the company has already reached, which makes it reliable but not predictive. The prospecting software demand signals that matter most are usually a combination of VAT status, sector and hiring activity.

Pair VAT status with sector. A VAT-registered construction firm in the West Midlands behaves differently from a VAT-registered software company in Greater London. The registration is the same; the buying process is not.

One caution: VAT registration is not the same as VAT compliance. A company can be registered and still be late with returns. HMRC publishes a list of deliberate defaulters, but absence from that list is not proof of good standing.

The HM Revenue & Customs collection pages are the authoritative place to confirm what each register does and does not contain.

PAYE records, Making Tax Digital and what they reveal about headcount

PAYE is the system employers use to report payroll to HMRC. Every UK employer with staff on payroll has a PAYE scheme reference. That reference is not public in the way a company number is, but it appears on payslips and some published documents.

PAYE headcount signals are indirect. A growing PAYE scheme suggests hiring. A scheme that has been closed suggests the company has stopped employing staff, which often precedes dormancy or dissolution. You cannot see the exact number of employees from public PAYE data, but you can see whether a scheme exists and whether it is active.

In practice you check a PAYE scheme indirectly rather than through a register. Employee numbers appear in the notes to full accounts filed at Companies House. An employer with staff must run an automatic enrolment pension scheme, and The Pensions Regulator publishes scheme information you can search.

An active payroll usually shows up in job adverts and in payslip references. Where headcount decides a deal, ask the company to confirm its PAYE position directly.

Under Making Tax Digital for VAT, businesses registered for VAT must keep digital records and submit returns using compatible software. That requirement has pushed many small companies onto accounting platforms. A company that files digitally is more likely to have clean, matchable data than one still on paper.

The Making Tax Digital for VAT guidance explains the digital record keeping rules.

The practical use for prospecting is timing. A company that has just moved onto digital VAT filing is often reviewing its finance and operations stack. That is a moment when new software gets considered.

A concrete trigger is a company that has just appeared on the VAT register in your monthly refresh, or one that has appointed a new finance director at Companies House. Both suggest a finance stack that is still being set up, and both are timestamps you can act on.

PAYE and VAT records together let you estimate company shape. A company with a VAT registration and a PAYE scheme and full accounts is likely to have employees, revenue and a finance function. A company with a VAT registration and no PAYE scheme may be a sole director consultancy. Both can be good customers, but they need different messaging.

For teams that need a repeatable process, build a small scoring model. Score one point for active status, one for VAT registration, one for an active PAYE scheme, and one for on-time accounts. A score of three or four is a strong fit for most B2B offers. A score of one needs manual review.

This is also where the prospecting software operating workflow matters. Enrichment should run before scoring, not after. The prospecting software operating workflow you choose should make that sequence explicit.

Compliance checks before a name enters your prospecting tools

UK GDPR and PECR govern how you can use personal data for marketing. The ICO enforces both. Company data is not personal data, but director names, sole trader names and some email addresses are. The moment a record includes a person, the rules apply.

Before a contact enters your prospecting tools, run four checks.

A short checklist for the enrichment step:

These checks add minutes per record. They also prevent the kind of complaint that costs far more. The ICO has fined organisations for unlawful direct marketing, and the reputational cost usually exceeds the fine.

Compliance is not a blocker to good prospecting. It is a filter that removes records you should not have been using. Teams that treat it as part of the workflow end up with smaller, better lists. The same discipline applies when you define a prospecting software target audience for a new segment.

A worked example of a Companies House and HMRC enrichment step

Suppose a UK revenue operations team sells finance software to companies with 20 to 200 staff. They have a raw list of 4,000 company names from two sources: a webinar attendee export and a downloaded directory of UK firms. They want to enrich and score it before any outreach.

Step one: match each name to a company number using Companies House search. Names that return no match are set aside as sole traders or unincorporated. In this example, 3,100 of 4,000 match.

Step two: pull status and filing history for each match. Of the 3,100, 180 are dissolved or in liquidation and are removed. Another 240 are marked active proposal to strike off and go into a manual review queue.

Step three: read the SIC codes against the code list the team agreed for its ideal customer profile. Keep companies whose primary code falls in finance, professional services or software. That narrows the list to 1,450.

Step four: check VAT registration for each remaining company. Around 1,100 have a valid VAT number. The rest are kept but scored lower.

Step five: look for PAYE evidence. Companies with a PAYE scheme and full accounts are scored higher. Companies with neither are scored lower.

Step six: apply the compliance checklist to named contacts only. Directors found through Companies House are checked against the suppression list before any email is sent.

The final list is around 900 companies, each with a company number, a status date, SIC codes, a VAT flag and a score.

The team now has a repeatable enrichment step. They can rerun it monthly, refresh statuses, and catch companies that have changed SIC code or moved into liquidation. That is the difference between a list and a pipeline.

Limits of public registers and where they mislead sales teams

Public registers are accurate at the moment of filing and decay afterwards. A company can change directors, move office or stop trading without updating anything until the next filing date. Treat every record as a snapshot with an expiry date.

SIC codes are self-reported and often wrong. A company may keep an old code for years because changing it has no immediate benefit. Sales teams that trust SIC codes alone will target the wrong companies and miss the right ones.

VAT registration is not a size signal. A one-person consultancy can be VAT registered. A large group can operate through a subsidiary that is not. The registration tells you about turnover thresholds, not about headcount or budget.

PAYE data is not public in a usable form. Any vendor claiming a full PAYE headcount for every UK company is inferring it, not reading it from a register. Inference can be useful, but it should be labelled as inference.

Coverage gaps matter too. Sole traders, partnerships, charities and public bodies are not represented in the same way as limited companies. If your market includes any of these, Companies House will undercount it. The Business population estimates are a better guide to the true size of a segment than the register alone.

Finally, public data says nothing about intent. A company can match every firmographic filter and still have no need for your product.

Common questions