Where every fact on this site comes from

How the tool works

Dataface is an investigation tool. When you open a company or a person, the tool retrieves their records from the official public sources listed below — live, or from a regularly refreshed index kept for speed, the way a search engine works — joins them (the director network, the insolvency record, the FCA register entry) and presents them side by side, each fact with a link back to its source. The official registers remain the systems of record, and what you see reflects them as at the time shown.

The sources

Companies House — the official UK company register. We pull a company’s identity and status, its officers (directors and secretaries, current and resigned), each officer’s other appointments (that is how the director network is walked), people with significant control (25%+ owners), filing history and filed accounts. Source: Companies House. © Crown copyright.

The Gazette — the official public record of UK insolvency notices: liquidations, administrations, winding-up petitions and orders, and personal insolvency notices. Every insolvency fact on this site traces to a Gazette notice or a Companies House filing, and is shown with its date.

What counts as an insolvency. A creditors’ voluntary liquidation, a compulsory liquidation or an administration, read from all of a company’s Gazette notices together with its Companies House insolvency case records. A members’ voluntary liquidation is a solvent wind-up — the directors declare the company able to pay its debts in full — and is never counted as an insolvency; it is shown as such. A liquidation whose type isn’t on record yet is labelled “type not on record” and not counted. Where a members’ voluntary liquidation later converts to a creditors’ one within a year, it counts as an insolvency dated from the start of the liquidation. The Gazette source on each page shows the date insolvency records are complete to.

The FCA Financial Services Register — the Financial Conduct Authority’s register of authorised firms and individuals. We query it as it is designed to be queried — one entity at a time, rate-limited — for a firm’s authorisation status, firm reference number (FRN), sector and appointed-representative relationships, and for its published list of prohibited individuals. Prohibition matches are made by name only, are always labelled “possible”, and must be verified on the register itself. Information from the Financial Services Register © The Financial Conduct Authority.

Filed documents, read by OCR — some figures (for example an estimated deficiency to creditors from a liquidator’s statement of affairs) are read from scanned Companies House filings by optical character recognition. These are always labelled “from OCR — verify” and link to the filing they came from.

The source chips and their colours

Every company and person page carries a row of chips — one per source consulted for that page. Hover a chip for a one-line explanation of the source. The colour is the status of that source for this page:

• green — loaded from the source.
• amber — partly loaded; some records could not be fetched, so counts are an honest floor.
• red — the source could not be reached; try again.
• grey — checked, nothing on record there.
• pale — not consulted (for example, a locked section before sign-in).
• hatched — still loading.

Possible other records for a person

Companies House sometimes files one person under more than one officer record — a director can appear as several “different” people with the same name and date of birth. Linked insolvencies are only ever drawn from the officer record Companies House itself attaches to a company. Alongside that, company and person pages show possible other records: records with the same surname, compatible forenames and the same birth month and year. They are labelled “not confirmed as the same person”, and every fact under them is worded about the record, not the person.

Where a name is rare on the register (only one birth date appears among the records that share it), what those records hold is opened automatically. Where a name is common, the birth month is missing, or a record holds 25 or more appointments, they are listed and opened only when you ask. Possible other records are never merged, scored, or counted in any finding, pill, watch alert or dossier. Different people can share a name and birth date: check the records at Companies House before relying on a match.

Corrections

Because the data is pulled from the official registers, corrections happen at the source. If a record about you or your firm is wrong, correct it at the register that publishes it — Companies House, the FCA, or The Gazette — and this site will reflect the source on its next retrieval. If you believe this site is showing something the source does not say, contact access@dataface.uk and we will check it against the source. How personal data is handled — including your right to object — is set out in the privacy notice.

What this tool is — and isn’t

Dataface is an investigation aid. It states what the public record shows, with dates and sources; it does not adjudicate, score, or make allegations, and a link between records is shown so you can judge it. It is not the Financial Services Register, the Companies House register or The Gazette, and has no official status or affiliation with the FCA, Companies House or The National Archives. Verify at the official source before acting on anything shown here.

Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.