Companies House Scraper

Look up any UK company by name and extract its registered address, active directors, and company profile — all in one API call per company.

---

What It Does

Pass in a list of company names and the actor fuzzy-matches each one against the UK Companies House API, then returns structured data including:

• Matched company name & number
• Registered office address (including extracted door/building number)
• Active directors — names parsed into title, first, middle, last; plus role, nationality, appointment date, and service address
• Company profile — status, type, incorporation date, and SIC codes

Name variations are handled automatically. "Almoner Care Group Ltd" will correctly match ALMONER CARE GROUP LIMITED using fuzzy matching with a configurable confidence threshold.

---

Input

Field	Type	Required	Default	Description
api_key	String	✅	—	Your Companies House API key. Get one free at developer.company-information.service.gov.uk
companies_names	Array of strings	✅	—	List of company names to look up
match_threshold	Integer	❌	85	Minimum fuzzy match score (0–100) to accept a result
latest_director_only	Boolean	❌	false	Return only the most recently appointed active director
request_delay	Integer	❌	1	Seconds to wait between requests (increase if rate limited)

Example Input

{
    "api_key": "your-companies-house-api-key",
    "companies_names": [
        "Sunlight Children's Care Limited",
        "Almoner Care Group Ltd",
        "Horizon Care and Education Group Limited",
        "Hopscotch Care Limited"
    ]
}

---

Output

One record per successfully matched company pushed to the Apify dataset.

{
  "searched_name": "almoner care group ltd",
  "matched_name": "ALMONER CARE GROUP LIMITED",
  "company_number": "13745628",
  "registered_address": {
    "address_line_1": "Seymour Chambers",
    "address_line_2": "92 London Road",
    "country": "United Kingdom",
    "locality": "Liverpool",
    "region": "Merseyside",
    "postal_code": "L3 5NW",
    "door_number": "92"
  },
  "active_directors": [
    {
      "full_name": "CONNOLLY, Frederick James Alfred",
      "title": "",
      "first_name": "Frederick",
      "middle_name": "James Alfred",
      "last_name": "CONNOLLY",
      "role": "director",
      "appointed_on": "2023-02-13",
      "nationality": "British",
      "service_address": {
        "premises": "Seymour Chambers",
        "address_line_1": "92 London Road",
        "locality": "Liverpool",
        "region": "Merseyside",
        "country": "England",
        "postal_code": "L3 5NW"
      }
    }
  ],
  "company_profile": {
    "status": "active",
    "type": "ltd",
    "creation_date": "2021-11-16",
    "sic_codes": ["87900"]
  }
}

Output Field Reference

Top level

Field	Description
searched_name	The name you submitted (lowercased)
matched_name	The official name returned by Companies House
company_number	Unique Companies House identifier

registered_address

Field	Description
address_line_1	First line of registered address
address_line_2	Second line of registered address
locality	Town or city
region	County or region
country	Country
postal_code	UK postcode
door_number	Extracted building/door number

active_directors[]

Field	Description
full_name	Full name as it appears on Companies House
title	Salutation (Mr, Dr, etc.) if present
first_name	Parsed first name
middle_name	Parsed middle name(s)
last_name	Parsed last name
role	Officer role (e.g. director, secretary)
appointed_on	Appointment date (YYYY-MM-DD)
nationality	Nationality as declared
service_address	Director's service address

company_profile

Field	Description
status	active, dissolved, liquidation, etc.
type	ltd, plc, llp, etc.
creation_date	Date of incorporation (YYYY-MM-DD)
sic_codes	List of Standard Industrial Classification codes

---

How Matching Works

Each name is normalised before comparison — punctuation stripped, common suffixes expanded (Ltd → Limited, & → and, etc.) — then scored against the top Companies House search results using fuzzy token sort ratio. Only matches at or above match_threshold (default 85/100) are accepted. Unmatched companies are logged and skipped.

Rate limiting (HTTP 429) is handled automatically with exponential backoff: the actor retries up to 3 times at 5 s, 10 s, and 20 s intervals.

---

Getting a Companies House API Key

1. Register at developer.company-information.service.gov.uk
2. Create a new application and select Live environment
3. Copy the API key and paste it into the api_key input field

The free tier is sufficient for most use cases.

---

Use Cases

• Bulk-enrich CRM or spreadsheet data with official company details
• Due diligence and compliance checks on UK businesses
• Research the directors and officers behind care providers, contractors, or suppliers
• Cross-reference Ofsted-registered providers with Companies House records

---

Notes

• Only active officers are returned (resigned officers are excluded)
• The door_number field is extracted heuristically from address lines and may be null if the format is non-standard
• Duplicate names in the input list are automatically deduplicated before processing
• The actor respects the request_delay setting between companies; set it higher (e.g. 2) for large batches to avoid hitting rate limits