UK Cold Email PECR Checker — Companies House

PECR Gate checks each UK business lead against the Companies House register and tells you, row by row, whether the lead is confidently linked to an active limited company, LLP or PLC — the entity types it confirms — or whether it has no confident register link (for example a sole trader, an unregistered business or a dissolved company), or needs a human look. Paste a lead list or a CSV link, get one structured verdict per lead with machine-readable reasons. No scraping, no email sending, no director data.

✉️ Why this matters for UK cold email

Under UK PECR, the electronic-mail consent/soft-opt-in rule applies to individual subscribers, including sole traders and certain partnerships. It does not apply to corporate subscribers, which include companies, LLPs and Scottish partnerships. Corporate marketing emails must still identify the sender and provide a valid contact address for opting out, and UK GDPR may apply where personal data is used.

PECR Gate deliberately assesses a narrower set of entity types: it confirms only active limited companies, LLPs and PLCs, and sends unsupported forms to manual review rather than making a legal assumption.

Most B2B lead lists mix individual and corporate subscribers with no way to tell them apart. PECR Gate answers the first question a UK sender needs answered: is this lead an active company, LLP or PLC on the register?

✅ What you get for each lead

Field	What it tells you
verdict	CORPORATE_CONFIRMED · INDIVIDUAL_OR_UNINCORPORATED · NEEDS_REVIEW
recommended_action	PASS · DO_NOT_SEND_WITHOUT_CONSENT · MANUAL_REVIEW
reasons	Codes you can filter on — e.g. OK_CORPORATE_ACTIVE, NO_CH_MATCH, NON_CORPORATE_FORM, COMPANY_STATUS_UNCERTAIN, MULTIPLE_CANDIDATES, EMAIL_FREEMAIL_UNVERIFIABLE, COMPANY_NUMBER_NOT_FOUND, SNAPSHOT_STALE
company_number, registered_name, company_type, company_status	The register record the verdict is based on, when one matched
lookup_basis	Whether the lead was matched by company_number or by business_name
snapshot_date, snapshot_age_days	The date of the register data this verdict used, on every row
billable	Whether this row is a charged check

A run summary (OUTPUT) gives counts per verdict, the events billed, the data date, and the disclaimer.

🔒 Conservative by design

• Exact matching only. A near-miss company name never passes. No fuzzy matching, no guessing.
• Fails closed. No register match, several companies sharing a name, a company in liquidation or with a proposal to strike off, an unsupported company form — none of these can produce CORPORATE_CONFIRMED.
• Honest abstention. Forms PECR Gate does not confirm — including Scottish partnerships (corporate subscribers under PECR), companies limited by guarantee and CICs — return NEEDS_REVIEW with a specific reason, never a legal assumption either way.
• Email sanity checks. Malformed or truncated addresses are flagged. Freemail addresses (Gmail, Outlook…) on a confirmed company are marked for review, because we cannot verify who controls them. If you supply the lead's website, an own-domain email that contradicts it is flagged.

📥 Input

Provide either a JSON list or a public CSV URL. One row per lead:

Column	Required	Notes
business_name	Yes, unless company_number is given	Trading or registered name
company_number	Optional	The fastest, most precise match. 8 characters (e.g. 01234567, SC123456). Numbers that lost leading zeros in a spreadsheet are padded. An invalid number is flagged, never guessed, and not charged
email	Optional	Screened for malformed, truncated or freemail addresses
postcode / locality	Optional	Separates companies that share a name (not used when matching by company number)
website	Optional	Enables the email-domain check

Blank cells are treated as empty. Optional setting: maximum data age (1–45 days) if you need fresher data than the default 45-day limit.

{
  "leads": [
    { "business_name": "Example Joinery Ltd", "email": "info@examplejoinery.co.uk",
      "postcode": "AB1 2CD", "website": "https://www.examplejoinery.co.uk" },
    { "company_number": "SC123456" },
    { "business_name": "J Smith Plumbing", "email": "jsmithplumbing@gmail.com" }
  ]
}

📤 Output example

{
  "verdict": "CORPORATE_CONFIRMED",
  "recommended_action": "PASS",
  "reasons": ["OK_CORPORATE_ACTIVE"],
  "billable": true,
  "company_number": "01234567",
  "registered_name": "EXAMPLE JOINERY LIMITED",
  "company_type": "Private Limited Company",
  "company_status": "Active",
  "lookup_basis": "business_name",
  "snapshot_date": "2026-09-01",
  "snapshot_age_days": 13,
  "checked_at": "2026-09-14T10:00:00Z",
  "source": "snapshot",
  "product": "PECR Gate"
}

(Illustrative values.)

🗓️ Data source and freshness

• Data comes from Companies House's monthly Basic Company Data product, loaded into a private index and refreshed every month. Contains Companies House data © Crown copyright, reused under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
• Every row tells you the date of the data it used. If that data is older than 45 days (or your stricter limit), every row is returned as MANUAL_REVIEW with reason SNAPSHOT_STALE, and nothing is charged.
• The monthly file lists live companies. A company dissolved or struck off after the data date can still appear until the next refresh — which is why the date is on every row.
• PECR Gate is an independent service and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or an official product of Companies House. Companies House data is used under the Open Government Licence.

💷 Pricing

$0.01 per successfully checked lead — 1,000 checked leads cost $10. Platform usage is included; there is no separate compute charge.

You are not charged for:

• invalid rows or invalid company numbers;
• rows returned as SNAPSHOT_STALE because the data is too old;
• internal errors, or rows left unchecked when your maximum cost per run is reached;
• runs that fail before checking starts.

A completed check is charged whatever its verdict — including NEEDS_REVIEW rows with a specific finding such as a company in liquidation, or several companies sharing a name — because the register was checked and the answer is specific. Set a maximum cost per run in Apify to cap any run.

🤖 Automation and AI agents

Structured JSON in, structured verdicts out, with stable reason codes. Call it from the Apify API, a schedule, an integration, or an AI agent's tool call, and filter on recommended_action. Runs take about 15–20 seconds to start while the register loads, then check leads almost instantly.

⚠️ What this Actor does not do

• It does not tell you an email campaign is lawful. CORPORATE_CONFIRMED confirms the legal-entity match only. It does not confirm that an email address belongs to, is controlled by, or is authorised by that company.
• It does not assess consent, soft opt-in, UK GDPR lawful basis, transparency notices, suppression lists, or the content of your emails. Responsibility for your campaign stays with you.
• It does not scrape websites, find email addresses, enrich contacts, send email, or return any director, officer or PSC data.
• It is decision support, not legal advice.

❓ FAQ

Does CORPORATE_CONFIRMED mean I can email this lead? It means the lead matched an active limited company, LLP or PLC on the register — the corporate-subscriber types PECR Gate confirms. PECR's consent/soft-opt-in rule for individual subscribers does not apply to corporate subscribers, but your emails must still identify the sender and give a valid contact address for opting out, UK GDPR may apply where personal data is used, and the rest of your campaign stays your responsibility.

Why is a lead with no register match INDIVIDUAL_OR_UNINCORPORATED? Sole traders and ordinary partnerships are not on the Companies House register, so a missing match is treated as a reason for caution (DO_NOT_SEND_WITHOUT_CONSENT), never as a licence to send. It is the conservative reading, not a legal finding: some businesses without a company record — such as Scottish partnerships — are corporate subscribers, but PECR Gate cannot confirm that from the register.

Why was a lead marked NEEDS_REVIEW? Every such row carries a reason — for example the company is in liquidation, several companies share the name, the company form is outside what PECR Gate confirms, or the email domain contradicts the website.

Should I use company numbers? If you have them, yes: a number identifies one company exactly. If you also supply a name that does not match the registered name, the row is flagged for review rather than assumed to be the same company.

Does Rudra Digital store my leads separately? No. PECR Gate does not copy your leads into a separate Rudra Digital customer database. Your input and results are processed within the Apify run and stored in that run's Apify storage, subject to Apify's applicable retention settings.