UK Public Contract Awards + Supplier Health

Who is winning UK public contracts, and what does the Companies House register say about them? This Actor pulls award notices from the two official UK procurement portals, Find a Tender and Contracts Finder. It matches every supplier to Companies House, gives each match a confidence score and the evidence behind it, and adds register signals about the company the notice named or numbered: register status (liquidation, dissolved, proposal to strike off), overdue accounts, a very young company with a large award, dormant accounts. Each row gets a review priority saying how soon it is worth checking the register.

Register signals are indicators to investigate, not findings. They describe a company's public register record, not its finances or performance, and they depend on the match being right. Do not rely on this output to decline a supplier, terminate a contract, or make a credit decision without checking the register (and the original notice) yourself.

It is built for:

• bid and sales teams doing competitor and market intelligence;
• public-sector buyers deciding which suppliers to look up on the register first;
• B2B teams who want leads on recently funded suppliers.

What makes it different

• Award data joined to company data. Each award × supplier row includes the matched company number, register status, age, SIC codes, accounts type, overdue filings and outstanding charges.
• Honest matching. Every match has a matchConfidence (0–1), a matchMethod and matchEvidence: the candidate company, name similarity, postcode agreement and any review reasons. Matches below your threshold come back as review or unmatched and are not charged as enriched.
• No forced matches. Public bodies, charities, overseas firms and sole traders are labelled with entityType / matchStatus: not_a_company instead of being forced onto a lookalike company.
• Confidence next to every signal. Each flag repeats the matchConfidence, matchMethod, companyNumber and data date it depends on, and every row has a plain-English riskBasis.
• No high priority on a guess. riskLevel / reviewPriority can only be high when the match used a company number published in the notice or scored ≥ 0.95. Name-only matches below 0.95 are capped at medium.

Accuracy (measured, not promised)

Tested on 30 days of notices (5,190 awards, 3,979 unique suppliers, 21 Sep–21 Oct 2026) against the Companies House snapshot of 1 Oct 2026:

Measure	Result
Company-type suppliers matched at ≥ 0.85	94.7%
All suppliers matched at ≥ 0.85	77.1% (many suppliers are not companies)
Weighted precision of matches at ≥ 0.85	about 98%: posterior median 98.3%, 95% interval 95.7%–99.4%

How the precision figure was made, and why it is optimistic:

• AI-assisted labels, not a hand check. A stratified sample of 364 matches (every match that drove a risk flag, plus a sample of the rest) was labelled right/wrong by the AI assistant that built the Actor, by comparing each notice with the Companies House record. The labels were not made by a person. At least one label was later found to be wrong (Made by Allen was labelled a wrong match and is in fact correct).
• In-sample. The matching rules were tuned on those same 364 labels, so the figure is not an independent test. Expect real-world precision to be somewhat lower.
• The stratum-weighted point estimate is 99.7%; we quote the posterior median and interval because the sample has few errors and the point estimate overstates certainty.

Known residual errors:

• brand names that match an unrelated or dormant company;
• buyer-supplied company numbers that point to a related company.

Input examples

Last 7 days of cleaning awards over £25k in the North West:

{ "mode": "awards", "lookbackDays": 7, "keywords": ["cleaning"], "cpvCodes": ["90910000"], "regions": ["North West"], "minValueGBP": 25000, "maxItems": 500 }

Health check of specific companies, plus the awards they won in the last 30 days:

{ "mode": "suppliers", "supplierCompanyNumbers": ["02183240", "SC188426"], "lookbackDays": 30 }

Field	Default	Notes
mode	awards	awards or suppliers
sources	both	find-a-tender, contracts-finder
dateFrom / dateTo / lookbackDays	last 30 days	Window of notice publication (Contracts Finder) or update (Find a Tender). dateFrom after dateTo fails the run with a clear message
keywords, cpvCodes, buyerNameContains, regions, minValueGBP, maxValueGBP	none	cpvCodes match on prefix
supplierCompanyNumbers	none	Suppliers mode only; up to 500
scanAwards	true	Suppliers mode: also scan notices in the window for awards to these companies. Turn off for a register-only check
enrichSuppliers	true
minMatchConfidence	0.85	Or 0.9 / 0.95
includeUnmatched	true
includeOfficerData	false	Personal data, off by default. When on: an aggregate officer-churn count, and the names of officers shared with possible successor companies (successorCandidates[].sharedOfficerNames). When off, rows only say whether officers are shared and how many (sharedOfficer, sharedOfficerCount). Needs the live API
useLiveCompaniesHouse	auto	auto: live API only where the monthly index is not enough (see below). always: refresh every match (slower; only with your own companiesHouseApiKey, otherwise treated as auto with a warning). never: index only
companiesHouseApiKey	none	Optional, secret (stored encrypted, never logged). Your own free Companies House key; used instead of the Actor's shared key
maxItems	1000

When the live Companies House API is used

Most suppliers are matched and profiled from the monthly Companies House bulk snapshot. The live API is called only for suppliers where it adds something:

• the supplier is unmatched or in the review bucket (for example a dissolved company missing from the snapshot, or a weak name match);
• the matched company's snapshot record is not Active (liquidation, administration, proposal to strike off, …);
• its accounts or confirmation statement are past due in the snapshot, so the live record may already show them filed.

Each supplier carries liveCheck.status (checked, not_needed, skipped_rate_limited or unavailable) and liveCheck.reasons. In suppliers mode, every requested company is looked up live.

Rate limits. Companies House allows 600 requests per 5 minutes per key. The Actor keeps under 500 per 5 minutes per run.

• Shared key: the Actor's built-in key is shared by all users. If Companies House returns HTTP 429 on it, the run does not stall. It stops live checks and finishes from the monthly index. You will see:
  • a warning in the run's OUTPUT summary (warnings, companiesHouseApi.disabled);
  • liveCheck.status: "skipped_rate_limited" on the affected rows.
• Your own key: supply companiesHouseApiKey and your run gets its own budget. Free keys come from https://developer.company-information.service.gov.uk/ (create an application, then a REST key). On a 429 with your key, the Actor backs off and retries as Companies House asks, honouring Retry-After.
• Rejected key: if your key is rejected (401), the run warns you and uses the shared key instead.

Output (one row per award × supplier)

{
  "source": "find-a-tender", "noticeUrl": "https://www.find-tender.service.gov.uk/Notice/099364-2026",
  "rowKey": "ocds-h6vhtk-05a82c:099364-2026-1:N:KITSUNGILTD|WV4 5HD",
  "title": "Recurrent Redistribution of Orthodontic UOAs in Northampton", "buyer": { "name": "NHS Northamptonshire Integrated Care Board" },
  "awardDate": "2026-10-16", "valueGBP": 3031914.5, "numberOfSuppliers": 1, "contractStart": null, "contractEnd": null,
  "cpvCodes": ["85131100", "85130000"], "regions": ["East Midlands"],
  "supplier": {
    "nameAsPublished": "KITSUNGI LTD", "entityType": "company", "matchStatus": "matched", "matchConfidence": 0.98, "matchMethod": "id_unschemed",
    "matchEvidence": { "candidateName": "KITSUNGI LTD", "nameSimilarity": 1.0, "identifierUsed": true, "postcodeAgreement": "different" },
    "companyNumber": "12392509", "status": "Active", "incorporated": "2020-01-08", "ageYears": 6.7, "sicCodes": ["86230"],
    "accountsType": "MICRO ENTITY", "accountsOverdue": false, "confirmationStatementOverdue": false, "outstandingCharges": 1,
    "companyDataAsOf": "2026-10-01", "companyDataSource": "companies-house-bulk-2026-10-01",
    "liveCheck": { "status": "not_needed", "reasons": null }
  },
  "riskFlags": [],
  "riskLevel": "low", "reviewPriority": "low",
  "riskBasis": "Register facts about the matched company (Companies House monthly snapshot, data as of 2026-10-01); match confidence 0.98 by a company number in the notice (no identifier scheme given). No register signals found.",
  "attribution": "Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0 (Find a Tender, Contracts Finder). Company data from Companies House.",
  "retrievedAt": "2026-10-21T17:43:57Z"
}

This micro-entity supplier is not flagged: the notice gives no contract period, so the award cannot be turned into a per-year value to compare with the £1m micro-entity turnover limit (earlier builds wrongly flagged it against the whole £3m value).

Row fields worth knowing:

• riskLevel: severity of the register signals on the row (low, medium, high, or unknown when no company was matched).
• reviewPriority: how soon to check this supplier on the register. Same scale as riskLevel (not_assessed instead of unknown). It ranks rows for human review; it is not a rating of the supplier.
• riskBasis: one sentence saying which company the signals are about, the data source and date, and the match behind them (and why a level was capped).
• rowKey: stable id of the row, used to avoid duplicate rows and charges if a run is restarted.

matchStatus takes one of these values:

• matched: confidence ≥ threshold;
• review: a candidate scored 0.80 to just under the threshold, shown in matchEvidence;
• unmatched;
• not_a_company.

Register signals (risk flags)

These are indicators to investigate, not findings. They are about the company the notice named or numbered, as matched, and its register status on the date shown in dataAsOf. The thresholds are product choices. A flag with severity high only makes the row high priority when the match is identifier-based or ≥ 0.95 confidence.

Flag	Rule
DISSOLVED_OR_IN_LIQUIDATION / STATUS_NOT_ACTIVE	Companies House status is not "Active" (liquidation, administration, proposal to strike off, voluntary arrangement, …)
ACCOUNTS_OVERDUE	Next accounts due date passed more than 30 days before the data date (or the API's overdue flag)
CONFIRMATION_OVERDUE	The same rule for the confirmation statement
YOUNG_COMPANY_LARGE_AWARD	Under 2 years old with a single-supplier award over £250k
MICRO_ENTITY_HIGH_VALUE_AWARD	Micro-entity accounts, single-supplier award, and the award's value per year (total ÷ contract years, from the notice's contract start and end dates) is over £1m, the micro-entity turnover limit for financial years from 6 April 2025. No flag when the notice gives no contract period. Contracts under a year are not scaled up
DORMANT_COMPANY_ACCOUNTS	Latest accounts filed as dormant. Often means the notice named a dormant group company.
INSOLVENCY_HISTORY, HIGH_OFFICER_CHURN	Only with the live Companies House API (officer churn = 4 or more changes in 12 months; a count only)
NAMED_COMPANY_DISSOLVED_CHECK_CONTRACTING_ENTITY (medium, row in review)	The company the notice named or numbered was dissolved before the award, and an active company is linked to it: a current officer in common plus another link, or the same registered postcode plus a distinctive name token. Typical causes are a re-incorporation or a group sibling, or a stale company number in the buyer's supplier record. The candidates and their evidence are in matchEvidence.successorCandidates (shared officers as a yes/no and a count; names only with includeOfficerData). A dissolved company with no linked active company keeps the high DISSOLVED_OR_IN_LIQUIDATION flag
UNMATCHED_SUPPLIER	Informational: no confident match

Framework and dynamic purchasing system (DPS) awards list the whole framework value against every supplier. Value-based flags therefore use single-supplier awards only.

Pricing (pay per event)

Event	Price
Actor start	$0.00005
award-record (each row returned)	$0.003
supplier-enriched (only when the match is ≥ your threshold)	$0.010
supplier-profile (suppliers mode, per company)	$0.02

Example: 100 award rows, 68 of them enriched, costs $0.98. The Actor stops cleanly at your maximum-charge limit. Each row and each event is charged at most once, even if the platform restarts or migrates the run: progress is checkpointed to the run's key-value store and rows already returned are skipped on restart.

Limitations

• Coverage depends on what buyers publish. About 57% of suppliers in our sample had no company number of any kind (61.5% had no Companies House-schemed number), no postcode, or only a trading name.
• Company data is mostly a snapshot. It comes from the monthly Companies House snapshot, which covers live companies only. The live API fills in dissolved companies, insolvency history and same-day status only for the suppliers listed under "When the live Companies House API is used". companyDataSource and companyDataAsOf on each row tell you which source was used. With useLiveCompaniesHouse: never, or after a shared-key 429, everything comes from the snapshot.
• Award history is limited to the date window you set. There is no 24-month history yet.
• Delivery regions are only as good as the notice. Find a Tender NUTS/ITL codes are mapped to UK regions; Contracts Finder region names are used as published.
• Name-based heuristics are imperfect. For example, "Royal Mail" can be typed as a person's name. When a near candidate exists, such suppliers are returned as review.

Data sources and licences

• Find a Tender and Contracts Finder (Cabinet Office) OCDS APIs. Both declare the Open Government Licence v3.0 in every release package. Attribution is included in each row.
• Companies House:
  • the Free Company Data Product (bulk snapshot, free of charge);
  • optionally, the Companies House Public Data API, used under its developer terms with one key and within its rate limit.
• No personal data by default. Only company-level fields are output. Officer names appear only if you turn on includeOfficerData (shared officers between a dissolved company and a possible successor); otherwise officer information is reduced to yes/no flags and counts.

This Actor provides data, not legal, financial or procurement advice. Register signals are indicators to investigate, not findings: do not rely on this output to decline a supplier, terminate a contract, or make a credit decision without checking the Companies House register and the original notice.

Use with AI agents

The Actor can be called through Apify's MCP server or API like any other Actor. The review dataset view puts reviewPriority, the signals and their basis first. To get only rows worth reviewing, filter on reviewPriority in high/medium.