Insolvency & Bankruptcy Watch

Watch official insolvency publications for companies and sole traders and return only new matches. The Netherlands, the United Kingdom, France and the United States each have one adapter. Germany and Norway are listed and left unsupported, with the reason.

This Actor is a screening aid, not legal advice. Confirm the publication before you rely on it. Consumer insolvencies are excluded.

Supplier Risk Monitor can call the same check without this Actor:

from my_actor.check import check_insolvency

check_insolvency does not charge and does not write the key-value store. The caller keeps remember (publication ids only) and decides which matches are new.

What does Insolvency & Bankruptcy Watch do?

1. You pass companies (name, number, country) and/or keywords, plus the countries to check.
2. Each supported adapter reads its official source for publications on or after the saved watermark (or lookbackDays on the first run).
3. A register number or an exact normalised name is a firm match. A partial name or a keyword is possibleMatch: true with verifyNote possible match, verify.
4. The first run stores publication ids in the named store insolvency-bankruptcy-watch-state (seen-<monitorId>, meta-<monitorId>) and returns no rows unless Include baseline is on. Later runs return only ids that were not stored. State holds ids, country, source and a personal flag. It does not hold names, birth dates or addresses. Personal ids are dropped after 90 days.

Country coverage

Country	Source	Coverage	Terms
NL	Centraal Insolventieregister searchUndertaking + getCase	Supported when you supply your free CIR subscription (cirUsername, cirApiSecret)	Trade-information use. Delete case data within six months after the proceeding ends. The natural-person operation is never called.
GB	The Gazette insolvency notice feed	Supported. Corporate notice codes 24xx only	Open Government Licence v3. Personal data is outside that licence. Fair use: identifiable user agent, robots.txt, at most 5 requests / 10 seconds, and on the platform only 21:00–07:00 UK. Schedule overnight.
FR	BODACC annonces commerciales	Supported. Collective proceedings that carry a SIREN. A natural person's name is withheld unless Include personal names is on	Licence Ouverte 2.0. No key.
US	SEC EDGAR Form 8-K item 1.03	Supported for a numeric CIK	Free EDGAR fair-access rules (declared user agent, under 5 requests/second here). PACER is paid ($0.10/page) and is not called. Item 1.03 is not a national bankruptcy docket.
DE	insolvenzbekanntmachungen.de	Unsupported. No request is made	Official FAQ item 13: no download interface. Automation is limited to one named-debtor lookup (Einzelabruf), which is not a feed of new proceedings. The InsBekV further restricts consumer notices.
NO	Brønnøysund Konkursregisteret	Unsupported. No request is made	No anonymous open feed. The JSON service needs a legal basis for national identity numbers. XML announcements are a signed SFTP subscription.

Czech ISIR and Estonia Ametlikud Teadaanded publish insolvency notices, and the e-Justice interconnection portal exists. They are not wired: ISIR returns full debtor files including consumers, and the others had no verified open bulk feed when this Actor was written. Add a module under my_actor/sources/ and register it in ADAPTERS.

Why use it?

• One schedule covers the supported countries. Unsupported countries come back with a reason and are not charged.
• Daily runs that see the same publication finish without a new-match charge.
• maxEntities (default 25) is named in the run status message.
• The run is pinned to 256 MB.

What data can it extract?

Field	Meaning
source	UK_GAZETTE, NL_CIR, FR_BODACC or US_EDGAR
name / registrationNumber	Business name and company number, SIREN, KvK or CIK when the source published one
entityKind	company or sole-trader
matchConfidence	1 register number, 0.96 exact name, lower for a possible match
possibleMatch / verifyNote	true and possible match, verify when the hit is not exact
eventType	baseline (uncharged) or new-match (charged)
charged	true only on a new-match row
disclaimer	Repeated on every row

Practitioner names, given names, birth dates, addresses and EINs are not copied.

How to watch a company

1. Add companies. Use GB (or UK), NL, FR or US. DE and NO return the unsupported reason.
2. For the Netherlands, paste your free CIR username and password. Without them, NL is skipped and not charged.
3. Leave Include baseline off so the first run only seeds state. Turn it on when you want that first window as uncharged rows.
4. Schedule UK runs between 21:00 and 07:00 UK time. A platform run outside that window skips the Gazette and does not charge those GB entities.
5. Optional Webhook URL receives one JSON digest when there is at least one new match.

How much does it cost?

Pay per event. The live price is .actor/pricing.json.

Event	Price	When
watched-entity	$0.003	One company, sole trader, or keyword actually checked on a supported source
new-match	$0.03	One new business publication after the baseline

Apify keeps 20% and then deducts platform usage. Compute is priced at the FREE tier, $0.20 per CU (1 GB for one hour). This Actor pins 256 MB (0.25 GB) and a 120 second timeout. Two key-value writes are $0.05 per thousand.

Worst small run: 1 entity, 0 matches, held for the full 120 seconds.

• Compute 0.25 * 120/3600 * 0.20 = $0.001667. Two state writes = $0.0001. Platform total $0.001767.
• Event revenue $0.003. Publisher share after 20% = $0.0024.
• Profit about $0.00063.

Five entities and no match in 60 seconds keep about $0.011. One entity plus one new match, even at the full 120 seconds, keeps about $0.025 (the match also writes one dataset row at $0.005 per thousand). A run with no companies and no keywords exits before any charge. The local offline suite does not produce a platform invoice; the one-entity harness wall time is in Local check below.

Input

{
  "entities": [
    {"name": "Example Holdings Ltd", "number": "12345678", "country": "GB"}
  ],
  "keywords": ["Example Holdings"],
  "countries": ["GB", "FR", "NL", "US"],
  "monitorId": "default",
  "lookbackDays": 7,
  "includeBaseline": false,
  "includePersonalNames": false,
  "maxEntities": 25,
  "maxMatches": 25,
  "webhookUrl": "https://example.com/hook",
  "cirUsername": "YOUR_CIR_USER",
  "cirApiSecret": "YOUR_CIR_PASSWORD"
}

Output

{
  "source": "UK_GAZETTE",
  "country": "GB",
  "name": "EXAMPLE HOLDINGS LTD",
  "matchedOn": "register-number",
  "matchConfidence": 1,
  "possibleMatch": false,
  "eventType": "new-match",
  "charged": true
}

A partial name comes back with "possibleMatch": true and "verifyNote": "possible match, verify".

Tips

• One monitorId per schedule. Reset monitor state drops seen ids for that id.
• Keywords are possible matches. Prefer a register number when you have one.
• A US watch needs a CIK in number. There is no ticker map, and PACER is not a fallback.

FAQ, disclaimers and support

Official notices can name people. This Actor keeps business names and register numbers and drops consumer proceedings (Gazette 25xx, CIR natural persons with no KvK and no trade name, BODACC rows with no SIREN). A BODACC row with a SIREN but no company form (SAS, SARL, SA, and the other forms in the parser) is treated as a natural person: the SIREN is kept and the name is omitted unless Include personal names is on. It is not a credit rating.

A repeated CIR case file is reused from the named store for 24 hours. Gazette, BODACC and EDGAR feeds are remembered only inside the current run, so the next schedule still sees a new publication.

Personal data is protected by the GDPR in the European Union and by other laws elsewhere. Use the rows when you have a legitimate reason to screen a business you already hold. CIR terms require you to delete case data within six months after the proceeding ends. If you are unsure, ask your lawyers.

Questions and bugs belong on the Issues tab. Programmatic runs use the API tab.

Sources and terms

• Netherlands CIR webservice: free subscription, searchUndertaking and getCase only. https://www.rechtspraak.nl/registers/webservice-centraal-insolventieregister
• The Gazette insolvency feed, Open Government Licence, fair-use window 21:00–07:00 UK. https://www.thegazette.co.uk/fair-use-policy
• BODACC / DILA, Licence Ouverte 2.0. No key.
• SEC EDGAR submissions, free. PACER is not used.
• Germany and Norway: documented as unsupported above. No HTTP call.

Local check

Offline suite: python3 tests/harness.py suite actors/insolvency-bankruptcy-watch (18/18) plus python3 -m unittest tests.test_unit (29 tests). The one-entity Gazette baseline (R1) took 2.6s wall time in that harness. That is local replay time, not a platform invoice. The price above uses the 120 second timeout.