Why this exists

Every UK limited company has a public credit file. It is assembled from the Companies House register, it is read by lenders, insurers and buyers before they speak to you, and almost nobody has ever looked at their own.

What we do

We read the Companies House record the way a credit reference agency does — filing deadlines, registered charges, director changes, what the accounts say — and write back what it means in plain English. Then we keep reading it, every day, and tell you the day something moves.

We have scored all 4,755,166 live limited companies on the register, not a sample. That is what makes the comparison on your report a real one: you are placed against your own sector, by the hundred thousand.

What we are not

We are not a credit reference agency. Experian, Creditsafe and Dun & Bradstreet are. They hold trade payment data we cannot see, and their score is the one a lender is most likely to pull.

What we can tell you is how the public part of your file reads, which is the part you can actually change. A score here is our own analysis of the published record and is not a prediction of insolvency — we tested that carefully, and the honest answer is that free public data does not predict company failure well enough for anyone to claim it does.

Who built it

Standfile is built and run by Jonathan Durban in London. One person, not a team — if you email us, you are emailing me, and I will reply.

It started from a straightforward observation: the register is open, it is free, it is read by people who decide whether to lend you money, and the companies it describes have never seen it. Making something public legible is not a clever idea, but nobody had bothered to do it for the people it is about.

Where the data comes from

Everything comes from the Companies House public register, published under the Open Government Licence v3.0. We take the monthly bulk release for the population figures and the live API for anything we are actively watching, so a company you are monitoring is read fresh rather than from a snapshot.

We add nothing of our own to the facts. The interpretation is ours; the record is theirs.

Standfile is a trading name operated from London, United Kingdom. Questions, corrections and complaints: jonathan@standfile.co.uk. See also our privacy notice and terms.