UK Company Growth Signals from Companies House

Turn a UK company list into a shortlist you can explain. The Actor reads each company's Companies House filings and sorts the list by a published rubric. Each row includes the figures and source link behind the score.

Use it to choose which prospects deserve research this month. Filing activity is a lead signal; it does not prove revenue growth, a funding round or buying intent.

See the result first

Leave the API key blank and run the Actor. You get three fictional companies without external requests or Actor event charges.

Fictional company	Score	Band	Appointments	SH01 filings
DEMO ROBOTICS LIMITED	70	GROWING	2	2
DEMO PRINT AND PACKAGING LIMITED	40	STEADY	1	1
DEMO HIGHLAND HAULAGE LIMITED	0	QUIET	0	0

The table shows real output from the built-in demo, which uses fictional companies. Open the dataset to inspect every reason, then export the rows as JSON, CSV or Excel.

Cost of a real run

$0.03 per matched company checked. A 20-company run costs $0.60 in this Actor's events; checking that list weekly for four weeks costs $2.40. Unmatched names and failed company lookups have no event charge.

Check the Pricing tab and your Apify plan for current platform or standby usage costs.

What it reads

For each company it pulls the profile, every officer on the register including the ones who resigned, and the filing history back to the start of your lookback window (six months by default). From those it counts:

• Board appointments in the window, from appointed_on on the officer list and the AP01 to AP04 filings
• Resignations in the window, from resigned_on and the TM01 and TM02 filings
• Share allotments (SH01), with the nominal capital stated on the form
• A registered office move (AD01) and a change of name (CERTNM and the other change-of-name types)
• Company age from the incorporation date
• Whether the accounts and the confirmation statement are on time

Every figure comes from the official Companies House public data API, read with your own key. Nothing is scraped.

The rubric

Seven lines feed the score. Together they add up to 80, so 80 is the top score.

Signal	Points	How it scores
New share capital	25	One SH01 in the window scores 15. Two or more score 25.
Board appointments	20	One appointment scores 10, two score 15, three or more score 20.
Company age	10	Under 3 years scores 10, under 6 scores 6, under 10 scores 3.
Filings on time	10	Accounts and confirmation statement both not overdue.
Registered office moved	5	An AD01 in the window.
Name changed	5	A change-of-name filing in the window.
Board stability	5	Appointments equal or exceed resignations in the window. More resignations than appointments scores 0 and says who left.

55 or more is GROWING. 30 to 54 is STEADY. Below 30 is QUIET.

A company can be genuinely growing without any of these signals showing on the register. A QUIET score describes the public record only.

What you need

A Companies House API key. It is free and takes about two minutes: register at https://developer.company-information.service.gov.uk/, create an application, add a REST API key. Paste it into apiKey and Apify stores it as a secret. It never reaches the log or the dataset.

Run with no key at all and you get three sample rows in demo mode, one in each band, scored by the same rubric as real ones. Nothing is charged and nothing leaves the container.

How to run it

{
  "apiKey": "your-companies-house-key",
  "companies": "09446231\nOctopus Energy Limited\nExample Trading Ltd",
  "lookbackMonths": 6
}

A company number is looked up directly. A name is searched and accepted only when the top hit is the same name once case, punctuation and LTD versus LIMITED are ignored; anything else comes back unmatched with the top three candidates attached, so you make the call rather than the Actor guessing.

Leave companies empty and fill in searchQuery, sicCode or postcodePrefix instead, and every company the register returns for that search is scored, up to maxResults.

To see only what changed since last month, run it monthly with lookbackMonths set to 1.

What comes back

One row per company. The Overview table shows the score, the band and the counts, so you can sort on the score column and start at the top.

Field	What it holds
input, matched	The line you gave and whether a company was found.
company_name, company_number, status, date_of_creation	As registered.
growth_score, growth_band	0 to 80, and GROWING, STEADY or QUIET.
appointments_in_window, appointed_names	Officers appointed since lookback_from.
resignations_in_window, resigned_names	Officers who resigned in the window.
share_allotments_in_window, share_allotment_capital, latest_allotment_date	SH01 count, the nominal capital on the forms, and the newest one.
office_moved_in_window, name_changed_in_window	With the dates.
company_age_years	To one decimal.
accounts_overdue, confirmation_overdue	With the next due dates.
reasons	Every rubric line that fired, with its numbers and points.
pitch_angles	Up to three sentences written from this row's own numbers.
companies_house_url, checked_at	Where to verify it, and when.
candidates, error	For unmatched names, the possible companies; for failed lookups, why.

A pitch angle looks like this:

DEMO ROBOTICS LIMITED filed 2 share allotments with Companies House since 2026-03-24, recording new shares issued; the filing does not establish how much funding was raised.

The OUTPUT record in the key-value store carries the summary: how many companies landed in each band, the ten highest scores with their first pitch angle, and one line you can drop into Slack.

Honest limits

• The nominal capital on an SH01 is the face value of the shares. The price paid can be far higher: three pounds of nominal capital can be a large round at a premium. The count of allotments is the signal; the figure is context.
• The officer list and the filing history are read from the public register, which lags. An appointment made last week may not be on it yet.
• None of this is a judgement about the company. It describes what the public record showed on the day it was read.

Use it from an AI agent

Every part of this Actor is reachable from an AI agent, because I also run it as an MCP server. The endpoint is https://fractionalhqforyou--uk-company-growth-signals.apify.actor/mcp and the tool is find_uk_growth_signals, which takes the same input and returns the rows and the summary in one call. Agent runs are charged the same per-event price. When a client cannot take a raw endpoint, load apify/actors-mcp-server with fractionalhqforyou/uk-company-growth-signals in its Actor list.

Help with your first run

Open an issue on this Actor with the run ID and the result you expected. Remove API keys and private records before sharing. Built and maintained by Jessy Mariau.