The Ukrainian official companies register can be found at http://irc.gov.ua/ua/Poshuk-v-YeDR.html. The interface and information is in Ukrainian only but Google’s translation option does a good enough job to help you through the site. If you use Google Chrome as your browser you can enable its automatic translation prompt by going to Options, Under the Bonnet, and ticking the Translate box. Many thanks to Ladymyr Bondar for alerting me to the site.
Company Director Check (http://company-director-check.co.uk/) is a sister database to Company Check (http://companycheck.co.uk/), which I reviewed earlier this year (http://www.rba.co.uk/wordpress/2011/01/10/free-uk-company-information/). It provides free access to information on current and past directors of UK companies that until now has only been available for a fee. Director searches can unearth links between apparently unrelated companies and help you identify “families” or groups of companies. It can also bring to light interesting patterns of behaviour. For example, I carried out a search on a director whose business activities had aroused my suspicions. I knew he had run companies in the past that had been dissolved and his most recent venture had gone into liquidation. Looking at the list of companies of which he had been director it became clear that 6-8 weeks before a company was dissolved or went under he would set up a completely new company. This had happened so often that it was not just me who had begun to smell a rather large rodent. I understand that he is “currently under investigation”!
If you are viewing a company in Company Check click on the director’s name and you are taken straight to their record in Director Check. Alternatively just run a search on the person’s name in Director Check. A list of possible matches will be presented to you, which you can refine by entering a postcode. Alternatively just work through the list until you are certain that you have found the correct person. Do not be surprised if you find a director has multiple IDs. There is nothing “dodgy” about this, it just reflects the way the system has evolved over the years. Companies House have carried out a massive exercise to try and fix this but there are still some multiple IDs in the database.
The information that is provided includes full name, short name, month and year of birth, address and past and present directorships.
The status of each directorship – active, dissolved, resigned – is displayed followed by a summary of each of the companies. More detailed information on the individual companies can be found on the Company Check web site.
Now that so much directorship information is freely available it will be interesting to see if more directors make use of the option to provide a service rather than their home address for the public record.
Definitely one to add to your business research toolkit.
The PowerPoint that was the outline for my workshop at UWE in Bristol earlier this week is now on authorSTREAM. The top 10 tips from the workshop participants are in my earlier blog posting “Business Information: Top Ten Tips from Bristol” http://www.rba.co.uk/wordpress/2011/09/09/business-information-top-ten-tips/
The University of the West of England (UWE) hosted the UKeiG 8th September workshop on business information. The list of participants included people from academic libraries, public libraries, the legal sector and freelance researchers. The day got off to an interesting start with one of the participants telling me that a colleague of theirs thought there wasn’t any quality business information on the web! I hope I proved them wrong. Some of the materials provided on the day can be found on my web site at http://www.rba.co.uk/bi/. Please note that SocialMention, which is mentioned in the latter part of the PowerPoint presentation, has been down for nearly five days and we have to assume that it is “no more”. [Update 10th September: after nearly a week offline SocialMention is now back online].
Those of you who have attended my Google, general search or business information workshops will know that towards the end of the afternoon I always ask the group to come up with a list of top ten tips. These can be useful sites that they have discovered during the day, essential services that they already use or commands that help focus the search. A combined list of tips from previous business information workshops is at http://www.rba.co.uk/bi/TopBusInfoSearchTips.pdf. Below, in no particular order, are the new tips from the 8th September workshop.
1. Biznar http://www.biznar.com/ Biznar is a federated search engine that runs your search in real-time in about 80 resources. There is a list on the Advanced Search screen where you can deselect individual or groups of resources. Many of the workshop participants de-selected Google Groups, which seemed to their dominate results, and some went as far as to exclude the whole Blogs and Social Networks group. The results are combined into a single list and on the left hand side of the scree are organised into folders such as Topics, Authors, Publications, Publishers and Dates. These are computer generated but can help you narrow down your search.
2. Export.gov http://export.gov/“Helping U.S. companies export”. Information on markets and doing business outside of the US. As the strap line of the web site suggest this is aimed at US companies but the reports contain information that is relevant to anyone looking at external markets.
3. Guardian Data Store http://www.guardian.co.uk/data Visualizations and mashups of data relating to major stories in the news. Links to the original datasets are provided so that you can download the raw data.
4. Company Check http://www.companycheck.co.uk/and Company Director Check http://company-director-check.co.uk/. Both services use Companies House data. Company Check provides 6 years of figures and graphs for Cash at Bank, Net Worth, Total Liabilities and Total Current Liabilities free of charge and lists the directors of a company. Click on a director’s name and you are taken to the Company Directory Check – launched last week – where you can view other current and past directorships for that person.
5. Companies House http://www.companieshouse.gov.uk/. The official registry for UK companies. Services such as Company Check and Bizzy (http://bizzy.co.uk/) may provide more information free of charge but it is always worth double checking with Companies House to see if there is more up to date information. The list of documents available for a company in combination with the free services may be enough for you to make a decision on whether or not to do business with that company. Use the free WebCHeck service to locate the company in the register and then click on “Order information for this company”. You will then see a list of available documents: titles such as “Struck off and dissolved” followed by “Application for administrative restoration” might suggest that you should run a mile!
6. Zanran http://zanran.com/ This was recommended for identifying charts, graphs and tables of data in PDFs and Excel spreadsheets. Run your search and Zanran comes up with PDF and spreadsheet files that match your criteria. Hover over the file icon in your results list and you will see a preview of the page that contains your data. We did come across a few oddities: my test search on gin vodka sales uk came up with the bar menu for the Time & Space Restaurant at the Royal Institution of Great Britain. The Zanran “About us” page tells you more about what they do (http://zanran.com/help/about_us)
7. Applegate directories http://www.applegate.co.uk/ A collection of business directories for electronics, engineering, plastics, rubber, chemical, oil, gas and recruitment services covering the UK. Recommended for generating lists of companies by location.
8. Kompass http://www.kompass.com/. Well established directory with world-wide coverage (some of us can remember the black, hard copy volumes!) Search is free and some results are free. Pay as you go options are reasonably priced and there is extensive country and industry coverage.
9. Public libraries’ databases and resources. A reminder from the public libraries contingent that you can access their resources free of charge for personal use from your desktop using the identification on your library card, for example NewsUK and the The Times Digital Archive. Some library authorities also provide access to business databases.
10. Google Advanced Search Use the advanced search screen or commands to help focus your search on statistics and market research. For example use the ‘filetype:’ command to search for spreadsheets containing statistics or PDFs of industry/government reports. Use ‘site:” to focus your search on academic or government sources, for example site:ac.uk.
There is a lot happening in the UK business information sector at the moment. From two of my earlier postings on company information you will probably have gathered that competition between the providers is hotting up. And if you need statistics then the open data initiatives provide direct access to raw data – possibly.
If you are interested in business information and want to get up to speed with current developments I am running a UKeiG workshop on the topic on Thursday, 8th September. It is being held in Bristol at the Frenchay Campus of the University of the West of England. Further details are on the UKeiG web site at http://www.ukeig.org.uk/trainingevent/keeping-good-company-quality-business-information-web-karen-blakeman. The emphasis will be on free and pay per view services. Please note that you do not have to be a member of UKeiG to attend, and the workshop will be relevant to all types of organisations.
If you are new to business information I am also running a workshop entitled “Introduction to Business Research” for TFPL on 15th September in London (http://www.tfpl.com/training/courses/coursedesc.cfm?id=TR1116&cid=rs)
I first reviewed Company Check (http://www.companycheck.co.uk/) earlier this year (Free UK company information http://www.rba.co.uk/wordpress/2011/01/10/free-uk-company-information/). Since then they have made more UK company information available free of charge. As well as Cash at Bank the service also shows 6 years of figures and graphs for Net Worth, Total Liabilities and Total Current Liabilities. Data is taken from official Companies House documents. Documents can be purchased through UK Data (http://ukdata.com/) but they are much more expensive than ordering direct from Companies House (http://www.companieshouse.gov.uk/) or bizzy (http://bizzy.co.uk/). UK Data’s detailed credit reports are worth considering though if you want more in depth analysis. Although Company Check lists the company directors it does not show other directorships as does bizzy. (See my previous posting Company information: Bizzy for UK company data and credit ratings http://www.rba.co.uk/wordpress/2011/07/19/company-information-bizzy-for-uk-company-data-and-credit-ratings/). This is another very useful site that I recommend you add to your company information toolkit.
There are numerous services that take UK Companies House data and repackage it. Some of the data is offered free of charge but more detailed information and additional analysis such as credit reports are priced. bizzy (http://www.bizzy.co.uk/) is one such organisation but uniquely it also offers free credit ratings for many UK limited companies. (Note that it is the overall rating and not the full report that is available free of charge.)
To search bizzy simply enter the name of a company and bizzy presents you with a list of likely matches. Click on the company you want to view and as well as documents available for purchase you can see free of charge the names of the directors together with a list of the other companies of which they are directors, industry sector, date of incorporation, registered address, and a list of competitors and peers.
To see the credit rating of the company you have to register with the site. Ordinary registration is free but there is also a bizzy PLUS account (£9.99/month or £99/year). The PLUS account allows you to view credit limits, mortgages and CCJs, includes a Risk Tracker for monitoring companies of interest, and gives you a 15% discount on all purchases. If you have the bizzy FREE account you will only be able to see credit ratings that are from 100 down to 30. Those below 30 show “Not public for this company” for their credit rating. If you have signed up for the bizzy PLUS all credit ratings are displayed.
The bizzy credit scores are as follows:
85 and 100 – ‘Excellent Creditworthiness’,
70 and 84 – ‘Very Good Creditworthiness’
50 and 69 – ‘Good Creditworthiness’
30 and 49 – ‘Creditworthy’
15 and 29 – ‘Credit Against Collateral’
0 and 14 – ‘Caution – Credit At Your Discretion’
I ran a check on a company for a friend of mine. They had heard rumours about the company and were uncertain as to whether it was safe to do business with them. Would the company go under? There was little to go on at Companies House as the company was filing abbreviated accounts and had not filed documents for the previous year. I used bizzy FREE to run the search and no credit rating was displayed. In order to see how bad it was I bought the credit report (£11.99). bizzy gave the company a rating of zero and the long list of outstanding CCJs for unpaid bills was all the evidence we needed to avoid the company like the plague. (The company concerned has now gone into liquidation).
Official documents filed at Companies House and bought direct from them cost £1 but can be bought via bizzy for £0.99. That is only 1 pence less than the Companies House price and might not be enough on its own to tempt you onto bizzy but the additional free information might. An important part of company research is uncovering what the directors are up to and bizzy makes it very easy to view a list of directorships held by a person. On the Companies House web site this is only possible if you subscribe to the full service rather than the free Webcheck option.
I have found that the information on bizzy is often more up to date than that provided by some of the larger credit rating companies and bizzy covers every UK limited company, even very small ones. I tried searching for three small companies using http://www.do-business.net/sbc, which I have often used in the past, and none of them were in the database.
Bizzy also searches official information and sells credit reports on companies in other European countries. It is not obvious how you do this until you start searching on the company name. Above and to the right of the list of companies on the results page is a ‘Search Country’ box and it is from the drop down menu that you select the country.
Remember, though, that the amount of information that companies have to disclose varies from country to country and may consist of little more than name, registration number, status and address.
If you are researching UK companies I recommend that you consider including bizzy in your toolkit, but should you go for a FREE or PLUS account? It all depends on how much company research you think you’ll do in a year. If it is just a handful then perhaps the free option will suffice but more than that and bizzy PLUS with its 15% discount and standard display of credit limits, mortgages, and CCJs makes more economic sense.
If you have ever tried to explain to a client why they will not find detailed financial accounts for companies registered in the British Virgin Islands, just thrust a copy of Guiding You Through… Company Searches In The British Virgin Islands – Withers LLP into their mitts! It very neatly summarises the registration, filing and disclosure requirements. The key sentence for researchers is:
“A company is not required to file its register of directors, register of members, register of charges or an annual return1 with the BVI Registrar of Corporate Affairs.”
So there you have it. Many thanks to Hazel Edmunds of ADSET (http://www.adsetsinformationweblog.blogspot.com/) for the link.
Many thanks to Britta Nordström for alerting me to this site. Business Ukraine (http://biznes-ukraina.ua/) has a useful collection of directories of companies, products and services in Ukraine as well as links to postal codes and transport timetables. There is also a list of Directories of the world on-line (http://biznes-ukraina.ua/extra.phtml?ttt=1&l=en) that is mostly yellow pages for countries around the world. The market reviews look interesting but the articles are subscription only.
There are Russian, Ukrainian and English language options for many of the sections but you may have to resort to Google’s translation service for some areas of the site.
I have added two more company registers – Slovenia and Croatia – to my Official Company Registers page at http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/registers.htm.
Slovenia
AJPES – Agency of the Republic of Slovenia for Public Legal Records and Related Services (http://www.ajpes.si/)
AJPES provides access to the Slovenian Business Register online (ePRS), and Annual Reports of companies, cooperatives and sole proprietors (JOLP) free of charge. ePRS currently has around 211,000 entries and includes companies (partnerships and corporations), sole proprietors, legal entities governed by private law, societies, natural persons performing registered or regulated activities, subsidiaries and other divisions of business entities and main offices of foreign business entities.
You can search on a range of criteria: name, identification number, tax number, address, activity, sector and legal form. The amount of information available on each business entity varies depending on its legal form but typically includes identification number, company name, tax number, details of representatives and founders, etc. Credit rating reports (eS.BON) are also available for a fee. The interface to the site is available in English, Slovene, German and Italian. The information is available in English and Slovene. Free registration is required to view the free documents.
Biznet (http://www.biznet.hr/) is maintained by the Croatian Chamber of Commerce and provides information and statistics on the Croatian economy, and access to the Register of Business Entities. The Biznet home page is in Croation and the link to the Register is under Registar poslovnih subjekata. You can view data for a single company or a selected set of companies grouped according to certain criteria for example industry, company size. Available information includes identification number, short and long name, county, municipality, address, phone, fax, E-mail, company size, main activity, legal form, number of employees, membership of professional associations. The Register is available in both Croatian and English and is free of charge.
Many thanks to Tomaz Lajovic for the information on both services.
Although much of the data on both sites is available in English some of the detailed reports and guides are in the local languages. Google’s Chrome automatically offers to translate texts and the Google toolbar for both Internet Explorer and Firefox has a translate option. If you are not allowed to install the toolbar then you can copy and paste the text or the URL of the page you wish to translate into Google’s translation tools at http://www.google.co.uk/language_tools. The quality of Google’s translations has improved significantly but you should still treat the results with caution. If the information is mission critical then find someone who is fluent in the language concerned to double check Google’s effort.