What Is a Company Credit Check? The Developer's Guide

What a Company Credit Check Reveals

A company credit check pulls together publicly available data about a UK company to assess its financial health and reliability. At minimum, it covers the company's current status (active, dissolved, in liquidation), its officers and directors, any charges (secured debts) registered against it, its filing history with Companies House, and any notices published in The Gazette.

This data paints a picture. A company that files its accounts on time, has stable directors, no outstanding charges, and no Gazette notices is probably healthy. A company with overdue filings, recently resigned directors, multiple charges, and a winding-up petition in The Gazette is in trouble.

Traditional credit check providers like Creditsafe, Experian, and Dun & Bradstreet charge £5-25 per report and wrap this data in a PDF with a proprietary credit score. For developers building automated systems, this format is useless — you need structured data, not a document. UKDataAPI provides the same underlying data as structured JSON with a Corporate Distress Score, at a fraction of the cost.

Who Needs Company Credit Checks

Any business that extends credit, enters contracts, or partners with other companies needs credit checks. The most common use cases are:

Procurement and supply chain teams use credit checks to vet suppliers before signing contracts. A supplier that goes insolvent mid-contract can halt production lines and cost far more than the contract value.

Credit departments use them to set credit limits for trade customers. Extending £50,000 of trade credit to a company with £10,000 in assets and a winding-up petition is a fast path to a write-off.

Compliance teams use them for Know Your Business (KYB) checks, verifying that counterparties are legitimate, active companies with real directors and no regulatory issues.

Investors and acquirers use them for due diligence, checking the financial health and corporate structure of target companies before committing capital.

Insurance underwriters use company data to price commercial policies, particularly trade credit insurance where the insurer is effectively guaranteeing the counterparty's ability to pay.

How to Run a Credit Check via API

With UKDataAPI, running a company credit check is a single API call. You need either the company number (e.g., 00445790 for Tesco) or the company name. The API searches Companies House, cross-references with the FCA Register and The Gazette, and returns a structured JSON response.

The summary depth (2 credits) returns the company profile and Corporate Distress Score. The standard depth (8 credits) adds officers, PSCs, recent filings, charges, and regulatory status. The full depth (16 credits) includes everything plus government contracts, detailed filing analysis, and complete score breakdown.

For most automated workflows, the standard depth provides the right balance of data and cost. Use summary for initial screening (filtering a large list down to companies worth investigating) and full for final due diligence on shortlisted entities.

You can try a company credit check for free using our Company Health Check tool — no API key or signup needed. It shows the company profile and Distress Score, which is enough to get a quick read on any UK company.

Understanding the Corporate Distress Score

The Corporate Distress Score is a proprietary rating from 0 to 100 that quantifies how likely a company is to enter financial distress. Unlike traditional credit scores where higher means better, the Distress Score works the other way — a lower score means lower risk.

The score synthesises multiple signals: filing compliance (are accounts and confirmation statements filed on time?), charge patterns (are new secured debts being registered?), officer stability (are directors resigning unexpectedly?), Gazette notices (has a winding-up petition been published?), company age and type, and FCA regulatory status where applicable.

Scores are grouped into bands: LOW RISK (0-20) indicates a stable company with strong filing compliance and no warning signs. MODERATE RISK (21-50) suggests some areas to monitor but no immediate concerns. ELEVATED RISK (51-75) means one or more significant warning signals are present. HIGH RISK (76-100) indicates multiple distress indicators and immediate investigation is recommended.

The full API response includes a breakdown of individual signals with their contribution to the overall score, allowing you to understand exactly why a company scored the way it did.

Red Flags to Watch For

Certain patterns in company data should trigger closer investigation:

Overdue filings are the single strongest predictor of corporate distress. Companies House gives every company a filing deadline — when a company misses it, it's either administratively negligent or unable to produce accounts. Either is a warning sign.

Recent director resignations, especially of the finance director or company secretary, often precede financial problems. Directors have personal liability if they allow a company to trade while insolvent, so they tend to resign when they see trouble coming.

New charges registered in the last 12 months suggest the company is taking on secured debt — potentially because unsecured lenders have withdrawn credit and the company is pledging assets to maintain cash flow.

Gazette notices are the most urgent red flag. A winding-up petition published in The Gazette means a creditor is asking a court to force the company into compulsory liquidation. A strike-off notice means Companies House believes the company is no longer trading.

Multiple address changes in a short period can indicate a company trying to evade creditors or regulatory action.

Automating Due Diligence at Scale

For organisations that need to check hundreds or thousands of companies, manual credit checks are impractical. The API enables full automation:

Set up a nightly batch job that checks your entire supplier or customer portfolio against the Entity Intelligence endpoint. Flag any company whose Distress Score has increased by more than 10 points since the last check. This gives you early warning of deteriorating suppliers or customers before they default.

For onboarding workflows, integrate the API into your signup or contract process. When a new company enters your system, automatically pull their profile and score. Route high-risk companies (Distress Score above 50) to manual review. Approve low-risk companies (below 20) automatically.

For continuous monitoring, use the API to poll your portfolio weekly and maintain a risk dashboard. The structured JSON response makes it straightforward to parse scores and signals into any monitoring tool or database.

At up to 500 requests per minute on paid tiers, you can process a portfolio of 30,000 companies in about an hour — something that would take a team of analysts weeks using traditional credit report services.