Why this exists
Every week somebody hands a deposit to a firm whose public record already showed the problem. The company was dissolved. The accounts were two years overdue. The director had closed four companies owing money and started this one three months ago under a slightly different name. None of that was hidden. It was all sitting on a public register, free to read, in front of anybody who knew where to look.
The trouble is that nobody knows where to look, because there is no single place. Company status is at Companies House. Director history is also at Companies House, but only if you open every officer in turn and then open each of their other appointments one at a time. Safety prosecutions are on a separate Health and Safety Executive register. Employment tribunal judgments are published by HM Courts and Tribunals Service. Gas Safe, TrustMark, NICEIC, FMB, the letting agent redress schemes, client money protection, anti-money-laundering supervision: each one is a different website with a different search box and its own idea of what a useful result looks like. Ten registers, none of which talk to each other, and all of them written for professionals rather than for the person about to pay for a loft conversion.
CheckAFirm does that walk for you and puts the result on one page in plain English.
What we do
- Pull the official company record: status, age, registered office, insolvency history and the procedure type where one applies.
- Follow every director to their other companies and count what happened to those companies, including dissolutions and insolvencies.
- Flag phoenix patterns, where a company fails and the same people restart under a new name shortly afterwards, and name the predecessor company so you can ask about it.
- Check filing behaviour, because overdue accounts are a legal breach and one of the earliest visible signs of a company in difficulty.
- Search HSE convictions and enforcement notices, and employment tribunal decisions naming the firm.
- Give you the trade registers that actually apply to that type of firm, with a direct link to verify each one, because displayed badges are frequently not held.
- Turn the lot into a red, amber or green verdict with a 0 to 100 score, every deduction explained and linked to the source it came from.
What we do not do
This matters as much as the list above, so it is set out plainly rather than buried.
- We are not a credit reference agency and the score is not a credit score or a credit rating. It is an information summary built from public records, and the method is published so anybody can see how a result was reached.
- We do not give financial or legal advice. Nothing on the site is regulated advice and none of it is a recommendation to use or avoid any firm.
- We do not vet, inspect, accredit or endorse anyone. We have never met these firms. We read the public record and report what it says.
- We do not treat a clean result as proof of anything. A green verdict means nothing bad has been recorded on the registers we check. The HSE registers only cover a limited recent period, plenty of bad behaviour never reaches a register at all, and sole traders do not file at Companies House, so there may be no company record to read in the first place.
- We do not sell leads or introduce you to firms. There is no directory here and no firm has ever paid us to appear or to look better.
Use a report the way you would use a reference: one input among several, alongside seeing previous work, getting the contract in writing, checking insurance, and never paying large sums up front.
How we make money
The free check is genuinely free and needs no account, no email address and no card details. If you want the full picture, the complete report costs £9.99 as a one-off payment.
- No subscription and no recurring charge for the report.
- No selling of your data. We do not sell, rent or share personal data with advertisers or data brokers.
- No paid placement, no sponsored results and no advertising from the firms being checked.
- No commission from anybody you go on to hire, and no relationship with any firm in the results.
That is deliberate. The moment a firm can pay to change its own result, the report is worthless to the person reading it.
Where the data comes from
Company and director data comes from Companies House and contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Enforcement data comes from the Health and Safety Executive public registers. Tribunal decisions come from HM Courts and Tribunals Service. Trade register information comes from the named scheme operators. Everything in a report is linked to the source it came from so you can read the original rather than take our word for it.
Who runs it
CheckAFirm is built and operated by David Skillett, a UK sole operator. There is no call centre and no sales team, which is why the product has to be good enough to explain itself. Registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office under reference ZC104940.
Email hello@checkafirm.co.uk for anything at all, including support, refunds, data protection requests and press.
If you run a firm and think a report is wrong
Every item in a report links to the public source it came from. If the source itself is wrong, correcting it at source, whether that is Companies House, the HSE or a trade register, corrects our report at the next refresh. If you believe we have matched you to the wrong record, which can happen where two people or two companies share a name, email hello@checkafirm.co.uk with the company number and we will investigate and correct it.