What Companies House Doesn't Tell You About a Supplier's Director (and How to Check)
Companies House shows a director's name and role at the company you're looking at. The risky information sits one search away, on their appointment history. Here's how to check a UK director properly in under five minutes.
A credit controller runs the Companies House check on a new supplier. Company active, accounts filed on time, no outstanding charges. She approves the credit terms.
Eighteen months later the supplier enters administration owing £23,000. A quick search on the director's name shows two previously dissolved companies in the same sector, one of which was liquidated with creditors unpaid. That information was visible on Companies House when she ran the original check. It just wasn't on the page she looked at.
This is the gap most UK businesses don't know exists. Companies House is good at showing you information about a company. It is bad at showing you information about the people running that company, unless you know exactly where to click.
This guide covers what Companies House does and does not show you about a director, how to check a director's record properly in under five minutes, and the patterns that should change the way you think about a counterparty.
Quick summary. A company page on Companies House shows the current directors by name and role. It does not show their appointment history, their past dissolutions, their disqualification status, or their concurrent appointments elsewhere. To get that, you need to click through to each director's individual profile and look at their full record. Below are the specific pages, the red-flag patterns, and a five-minute process you can copy.
What the company page actually shows
Open any company on find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk. Click the "People" tab. You see:
- Current directors by name, role, and appointment date.
- Resigned directors for that company only, with resignation date.
- Sometimes a date of birth month/year and a correspondence address.
That is the full extent of officer information on a company page. Everything else you might want to know is one or more clicks away.
What the company page does not show
The following information is available on Companies House, free, for every officer, but only if you navigate to the officer's own profile.
Their full appointment history. Every UK company this person has been a director or secretary of, active or resigned, across their career. Click a director's name on the People tab to open their profile page. The URL pattern is /officers/[officer-id]/appointments.
The status of each past company. Active, dissolved, in liquidation, in administration, struck off. A director with one active role and five dissolved companies behind them is a different risk to one with a single active role and no history.
Dates that reveal patterns. Incorporation dates, dissolution dates, appointment and resignation dates. These let you spot phoenixing: dissolve one company, incorporate another within months, move the same directors across.
Disqualification status. Whether the person is on the Register of Disqualified Directors. An active disqualification order is a legal prohibition on acting as a director. If a person on the register is listed as an active director somewhere, that is a serious flag.
Concurrent directorships. How many companies this person is currently a director of. Most professional directors hold between one and five active roles. A person listed as the director of 80 companies is almost certainly acting as a nominee, which materially changes how you interpret the named governance of any one of those companies.
None of this is hidden. It is all free and public. It just isn't surfaced on the page a typical credit check lands on.
The five-minute director check
Here is the process. It takes roughly five minutes per company once you know where to click.
Step 1: Open the company on Companies House. Search by name or number at find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk. Confirm you have the right entity by cross-referencing the number or registered address.
Step 2: Check the People tab. Note the active directors. For each one, click through to the officer profile page.
Step 3: On each officer profile, scan the appointments list. You are looking for three things.
- The total number of appointments, active and resigned. One to ten is typical. Thirty or more is a nominee director signal.
- The status of past companies. Count the dissolved, liquidated, and administration entries.
- The time gaps between dissolutions and new incorporations. A pattern of "Company X dissolved in March, Company Y incorporated in May with the same director and a similar name" is the phoenix pattern.
Step 4: Search the disqualification register. Copy the director's name and search it at find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/register-of-disqualifications. Names are common, so confirm date of birth month/year matches.
Step 5: Google the director's name with "liquidation" or "administration" as a suffix. Court filings and insolvency service news releases occasionally surface here. Not definitive, but fast.
Total time: four to six minutes for a typical director with a straightforward history. Longer if the history is complex enough to need it.
Red flag patterns
These are the patterns experienced credit controllers and commercial solicitors use to reinterpret a counterparty. Any one of them alone is worth noting. Two or more together usually changes the decision.
Pattern 1: Serial dissolutions. Three or more dissolved companies in the last five years where the director was active at the time of dissolution. On its own, this can be explained (portfolio directors, genuine failures). Combined with short gaps between dissolution and re-incorporation, it is the textbook phoenix signal.
Pattern 2: Rapid re-incorporation. A company is dissolved or liquidated, and within 180 days the same director appears as an officer of a newly incorporated company, often with a similar trading name or in the same sector. The assets and customers of the old company may have transferred informally. Creditors of the old company are usually left behind.
Pattern 3: Nominee indicators. More than fifty active concurrent appointments, particularly if the director's address is a single formation agent service address, and the appointment dates cluster around one or two specific days. This is consistent with a professional nominee arrangement. The named director is not the person running the company. Whether that is legal or not depends on the arrangement; the operational implication for your credit decision is that the public record is not telling you who is actually in control.
Pattern 4: Active disqualification. The person is listed on the disqualification register with an end date in the future, and is also listed as an active director elsewhere. This is either a data problem or a breach, both of which matter.
Pattern 5: Overlapping distress. The director is currently appointed at multiple companies, and one or more of those other companies shows distress signals (insolvency proceedings, late accounts, multiple recent charges). Distress at one company is a rough leading indicator of distress at the others.
Pattern 6: Recent mass resignations. The director resigned from three or more companies in the last 90 days. Sometimes benign (retirement, portfolio cleanup). Sometimes a signal the person is winding down exposure ahead of something.
Walkthroughs
Two walked-through examples of how the checks change an assessment.
Example 1: The new supplier
Company A Ltd. Incorporated 14 months ago. Single director. Company page shows active status, accounts not yet due, no charges.
Looking at the company page alone: low-risk, typical young SME.
Click through to the director's profile. Appointment history shows the current active role plus two previous companies, both dissolved in the last four years. One dissolved with a Gazette notice and a recorded objection that was never resolved. The second company dissolved was in the same sector as Company A and had a very similar name.
Reassessment: the same person has wound down two companies in the same sector, and is now trading as a third. Whether that is phoenix behaviour or genuinely new ventures is a question worth asking before extending open-account credit.
Example 2: The steady customer
Company B Ltd. Operating for 12 years. Two directors. Accounts filed on time for a decade. One small satisfied charge in 2021.
Looking at the company page alone: solid long-term counterparty.
Click through to director 2's profile. They have been appointed to six other companies in the last 18 months. Four of those six are incorporated within the same two-month window and share a single formation-agent registered address. Director 1 has 94 concurrent active appointments.
Reassessment: director 2 is a nominee. The named governance of Company B does not tell you who is actually controlling the business. The 12-year track record still matters, but the material people running the company today may not be the people the public record shows.
What Companies House won't tell you at all
Even with a thorough click-through, some information is outside the register.
Operational control. The Persons with Significant Control (PSC) register shows beneficial owners in principle, but relies on self-disclosure and is not independently verified. A shell PSC that points to another company or a trust can obscure the ultimate controller.
Financial performance. Small-company accounts are permitted to be filed in abridged form under FRS 105 and FRS 102 Section 1A. Turnover, gross profit, and debtor detail often aren't public. For a meaningful view of financial health, you need management accounts, which the company has to provide.
County Court Judgments (CCJs). Not filed with Companies House. You need Registry Trust for these.
Litigation. Live court actions are not filed with Companies House. MCOL and PCOL records, plus paid services like Experian's commercial database, are where you look.
How to check 50 companies a week without losing your evening
The five-minute process is fine for a handful of checks. It breaks down at volume. Three options, in rough order of cost.
Option 1: Batch it. Pick one morning per week. Run every new credit application through the full check. Anything that passes goes through; anything that flags goes to a second-pass review with the account manager involved. This is what most small finance teams do.
Option 2: Automate the searches with a script. The Companies House REST API is free. Register for an API key, and you can pull the officers endpoint for a list of companies and cross-reference against the disqualification register endpoint in a loop. A Python or Ruby script of around 200 lines can do the basic checks in bulk. You still have to read the output.
Option 3: Use a monitoring tool. Vigil is what we're building for this. Add a company to your watchlist, and Vigil checks each director's appointment history, runs the disqualification register check, flags the phoenix pattern, and alerts you when a new director with a concerning history is appointed to a company you track. Most of what this guide describes happens automatically in the background.
Pricing starts at £27 per month, monthly, no contract. Join the waitlist.
What to take away
The company page on Companies House is a starting point, not a complete check. The material information about the people running the company lives on the officer profile pages.
The five red-flag patterns worth learning are serial dissolutions, rapid re-incorporation, nominee indicators, active disqualification, and recent mass resignations. Two or more together is the usual threshold for rethinking a decision.
Manual director checks take about five minutes per company. Workable for a few checks a week, not for ongoing monitoring of an active customer base.
The UK public register has the data you need for most commercial due diligence. Creditsafe and similar services largely repackage the same public data. Where they add value is the cross-reference and the monitoring, not the raw data itself.
None of this replaces a conversation. If the record is ambiguous, call the director and ask.
Further reading
- Companies House officer search — the canonical source.
- Register of Disqualified Directors — free search for active disqualifications.
- Companies House API developer guide — free, requires a registered key.
- How to get dissolution alerts from Companies House — the companion guide to this one.
- How to spot supplier financial distress before it hits you — earlier signals outside the director record.
Frequently asked questions
Does Companies House show all of a director's past companies? Yes, but only if you search the officer ID rather than the company page. A company's officer list shows the directors of that company only. To see every company a person has been a director of, open the officer's profile and view their appointments page. This includes active and resigned appointments across all UK limited companies they have served.
How do I find out if a director has been disqualified? Companies House maintains a public disqualified officers register. Search a name at find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/register-of-disqualifications. A disqualification order prohibits the person from acting as a director for a set period. If a person on the register is listed as an active director of a company, that is usually either a data mismatch or a breach of the order, either of which is material to a credit decision.
What is a phoenix company and how do I spot one? A phoenix company is a newly incorporated company that takes over the trade, assets, or customers of a predecessor that has been dissolved or entered insolvency, often with the same directors and a similar name. To spot the pattern, check whether a director's appointment history shows a recent dissolution followed by a new incorporation within 180 days, especially one in a similar sector or with a similar name.
What counts as a red flag on a director's record? Several patterns are worth flagging: three or more dissolved companies in the appointment history within the last five years; a dissolution within the last two years followed by a new incorporation within six months; an active disqualification order; a very high number of concurrent active appointments (which may indicate a nominee director arrangement); and recent resignations from multiple companies in a short window. None of these are definitive, but combinations of them change the interpretation of a credit decision.
Is this information legal to use in a credit decision? Yes. Companies House data is public under the Open Government Licence. You may use it to inform commercial decisions including credit, contract, and procurement. Automated decision-making that affects individuals may engage UK GDPR requirements, so for consumer-facing applications take legal advice. For B2B commercial decisions, public register data is generally used without restriction.
Vigil is a UK company monitoring tool that automates the five-minute director check for your entire watchlist. If you'd like alerts when a director with a concerning history is appointed to a company you track, join the waitlist or get in touch.