UK Companies House Compliance Monitor

Watch a list of UK company numbers for overdue accounts, late confirmation statements, dissolution, liquidation and administration. Run it on a schedule and it reports only what has changed since the last run.

This is a compliance watch list, not a bulk Companies House search or director scraper. You already have the company numbers (clients, customers, suppliers). The Actor checks them and flags what needs attention.

Company-level data only: it does not fetch officer, director or PSC names.

Two ways to run it

	Demo mode (no key)	Full mode (your own free API key)
How	Leave apiKey blank	Paste your Companies House REST API key into apiKey
Companies per run	Up to 3 (any extra are ignored)	Your whole list
Data source	Public Companies House web page for each company	Official Companies House REST API
dataSource column	DEMO: public web page (no API key)	Companies House API
Charges, insolvency, liquidation and office-in-dispute fields	null (not available)	Filled in
Pace	About 1 company every 1.5 s	About 1.8 requests/s, under the API limit of 600 requests per 5 minutes

Demo mode is for trying the Actor. It reads the public web pages, so it may break if Companies House changes its page layout. For real monitoring, use full mode.

With no input at all, the Actor runs a demo check on company 00445790.

Get a free API key (full mode)

1. Register at https://developer.company-information.service.gov.uk
2. Create an application, then create a REST API key. It is free.
3. Paste the key into apiKey. Apify stores it as an encrypted secret.

Who it is for

• Accountants and bookkeepers watching a client list for late accounts or confirmation statements.
• Credit control and B2B suppliers vetting customers for dissolution or insolvency.
• KYB and onboarding teams who need a scheduled refresh of company status, not a one-off scrape.

Input

• apiKey (optional, secret): leave it blank for demo mode, or enter your key for full mode.
• companyNumbers (required): for example 00445790 or SC123456. Short numbers are left-padded to 8 digits, and duplicates are removed. Default: ["00445790"]. England and Wales, Scottish (SC…) and Northern Ireland (NI…) numbers are all accepted.
• dueWithinDays (default 30): marks filings as due soon within this many days.
• onlyChanges (default false): after the first run, outputs only companies that changed.
• monitorKey (default default): the name of the watch list. Runs with the same key are compared. Demo and full mode snapshots are kept separately. Snapshots are kept in the named key-value store companies-house-monitor-state-v2 in your own Apify account (created automatically on your first run; the Actor keeps Limited permissions).

Example: a short client list, weekly changes only

{
  "companyNumbers": ["00445790", "SC123456", "NI036672"],
  "dueWithinDays": 30,
  "onlyChanges": true,
  "monitorKey": "client-watchlist"
}

Output

One dataset row per company: number, name, status, type, SIC codes, postcode, the next accounts and confirmation statement due dates, overdue booleans, flags, changeType (baseline, new, changed or unchanged), changes and dataSource.

The SUMMARY record holds the mode (demo or api), counts, flag counts and errors.

Export to CSV, Excel or JSON, or connect the dataset to n8n, Make or Zapier.

Pricing

Pay per result: $3.00 per 1,000 companies checked ($0.003 per company), plus Apify's minimum actor-start event ($0.00005). You are charged for each company row delivered, including unchanged rows unless you set onlyChanges: true.

A weekly run of 100 companies that returns 4 changes, with onlyChanges on, costs a little over 1 cent after the first (baseline) run.

Limits

• Demo mode allows 3 companies, has no charges or insolvency data, and its parser depends on the layout of the public pages.
• Full mode uses your own free Companies House API key and is limited by Companies House (600 requests per 5 minutes per key).
• The data is only as current as Companies House.

Related tools

• UK Food Hygiene Rating Monitor (FSA)
• UK House Price Index by Local Authority

Data licence and attribution

Contains public sector information from Companies House licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

This Actor is independent and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Companies House.