The limitations of publicly available company data and how mnAI can overcome them
Going beyond companies house data searching and public company data
- Companies House
- The Gazette
- HRMC Land Registry
What is Companies house?
The first port of call for company information is often Companies House which is the UK’s official registrar of company information.
Through Companies House, you can access some details about a company for free, including:
- registered address and date of incorporation
- current and resigned officers, allowing you to do a superficial company director check
- previous company names
- accounts and annual returns
For regular updates, registering for the Companies House data product provides a free monthly snapshot of information about companies on the public register. This information includes:
- basic information including company type and registered office address
- the nature of business or standard industrial classification (SIC)
- company status, such as ‘live’ or ‘dissolved’
- date of last accounts or confirmation statement filed
- date of next accounts or confirmation statement due
- previous company names
In addition, Companies House API is still in development but eventually will let you retrieve data on companies live and in real-time.
Much of the Companies House data is free, though some services have a small charge, or you may need to create a Companies House log-in.
Find out more: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/search-the-companies-house-register
The problem is that the information provided by Companies House is very limited. The SIC codes used to categorise companies are imprecise, so if you are searching for a particular type of company within a sector, it won’t always be easily identifiable.
In addition, although you can find financial data, do a director search or check shareholders, the data you get isn’t always presented in a user-friendly way, especially if you are undertaking a UK-wide company search and looking at a large number of businesses or people.
Analysing and understanding the data from a company search is a time consuming, manual process and most probably won’t deliver all the possible insights.
What is The Gazette and HMRC land registry?
mnAI offers a new way to check UK company information
1. Generating geographic maps of every UK industry
mnAI can collate all sources of company data for specific areas and locations to create visual maps of every UK industry. Searches are performed using our proprietary keyword search technology instead of the standard SIC metric from Companies House, allowing more accurate searches at a granular level.
This visual dashboard presentation helps you to, for example, identify hotspots for growing/declining businesses, as well as all sorts of other UK sector and company information by geography such as financials and male vs female board comparisons. All this information is presented in moments.
Click here to learn more about our industry mapping technology

2. Identifying companies fast
Using Companies House to learn about individual businesses can be useful, but it cannot filter for lists of companies that meet certain parameters.
mnAI’s unique company identification CRM allows you to search for businesses using customisable criteria, with results produced in seconds. This sophisticated search capability replaces what was previously a largely manual search process, generating significant savings in terms of time and resources.
Click here to learn more about our company search technology

3. Visualising the networks of every UK company and the people behind them

4. Proprietary Algorithms provide unique industry insights

5. Perform due diligence faster

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