The same free check answers two questions: should I give them credit, and is this debt worth chasing?
Two moments matter: before you extend credit, and before you spend money chasing. The same public record answers both, most of it is free, and it takes about ten minutes.
Start at Companies House. Confirm the exact registered name and company number, that the company is active rather than dissolved, in liquidation or proposed for strike-off, and that the name on your paperwork matches it.
A trading name that does not correspond to a registered company means you are dealing with a sole trader or a partnership. That changes everything downstream: the pre-action protocol that applies, the documents that must be enclosed with a letter of claim, the enforcement options, and whether there is a person with personal liability behind the debt. It is not a detail — it is the first fork in the road.
Watch for near-identical names. Groups routinely run several companies with one word different, and invoicing 'Hartley Construction Ltd' when your contract was with 'Hartley Construction (Northern) Ltd' is a real and common problem.
Small company accounts are thin, but they are not useless.
Micro-entity accounts hide turnover and profit — only a balance sheet is filed. You can still derive something: the movement in net assets between two years is broadly retained profit after dividends, which tells you whether the company is accumulating or eroding value.
A check that does not change a decision is theatre. The output should be a number and a term, written down.
Illustrative — the percentage is yours to set, and it should be lower for a company whose accounts are old or whose net assets are falling. The point is that the limit is derived from something rather than guessed, and that it is reviewed when the account grows.
Then review it on a trigger, not on a diary: when the customer asks for more credit, when they miss a payment, or when their orders step up sharply.
Filings lag reality by months. Behaviour does not. The signals worth acting on:
A customer doing several of these at once is a customer to act on this month.
The same check decides whether chasing is worth it, and it is the step most creditors skip because they are cross. If a company has ceased trading, entered an insolvency process, or has no assets and a secured lender ahead of you, a judgment buys you nothing. It is far cheaper to establish that before the court fee than after it.
Where the answer is that the debt is dead, the remaining value is in the write-off and the VAT — see writing off a bad debt properly. Where it is alive, the next step is a letter before action.
For regular trade credit decisions, usually yes — but not for the score. The value is in monitoring and alerts: being told the day a charge is registered, a director changes, or a county court judgment is entered against a customer is worth far more than a rating you look up once. For a single decision about whether to chase one debt, the free public record plus the behavioural signals will normally tell you enough. Where an agency genuinely earns its fee is a ledger of many trade accounts, where you cannot manually watch everyone and the first sign of trouble is usually something filed rather than something you notice.
Usually that you have been deprioritised rather than that they cannot pay. Solvent businesses run payment runs, and suppliers who do not chase consistently drift down the list. It is rarely personal and it is almost never a decision anyone made deliberately. That is good news, because it is exactly the situation a letter before action is built for. A debtor who can pay and has simply not got round to you responds to a precisely costed formal demand with a real deadline, because paying you becomes cheaper and easier than dealing with the consequence. It is also the situation where escalation is least likely to cost you the relationship, provided the letter is firm rather than aggrieved.
There is far less public record — no filed accounts, no charges register, no officers list — so you are relying on behaviour, correspondence and whatever you know about their assets. That makes the assessment harder and makes early action more important. The process differs too. The Pre-Action Protocol for Debt Claims applies where the debtor is an individual or sole trader: a prescribed letter of claim, prescribed enclosures including an information sheet and reply form, and 30 days to respond before a claim can be issued. The upside is that there is a person with personal liability behind the debt, so enforcement options such as attachment of earnings or a charging order over property come into play.
Old enough that you should never treat them as current. A small company generally has nine months after its year end to file, so accounts on the register can easily describe a position eighteen months out of date by the time you read them. A company can fail comfortably within that window. Which is why the filing history often tells you more than the figures. Accounts filed at the last possible moment, a confirmation statement overdue, or a first-ever late filing from a company that was always punctual are all present-tense signals, whereas the balance sheet is history. Read both, but weight the behaviour.
Yes. Everything described here — the register, filed accounts, the charges register, filing history, directors' other appointments — is public information you can look at freely, and there is nothing improper or unusual about a supplier doing so before extending credit. Credit reference agency searches are different in one respect: some leave a footprint visible to other subscribers, so a flurry of searches can itself be a signal to the market. That rarely matters for ordinary trade credit decisions. What you should not do is misrepresent yourself to obtain information, or approach the customer's other suppliers in a way that suggests they are in difficulty when you do not know that.
The letter-before-action checklist, the interest and compensation rules, and the escalation ladder with what each step costs. One email, no sequence.
Tell us what you are owed and who owes it. You get back what the debt is actually worth once interest and compensation are added, what we would do first, and the fixed fee for doing it.