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Disclaimer

Cap News reports figures companies filed about themselves. Please read what that does and does not mean before relying on anything here.

This is information, not advice

Nothing on this site is financial, investment, legal, accounting or credit advice, and nothing here is a recommendation to deal with, or not deal with, any company. If you need advice about a business, including your own, take it from someone qualified and regulated to give it.

A deficit is not insolvency

Where we say a filing is in deficit we mean one narrow thing: the accounts reported liabilities larger than assets at the balance sheet date. That is not the same as being insolvent, unable to pay debts, or failing.

A company funded by its parent company, by a director's loan, or one early in its life and still carrying losses forward, can report negative net assets for years while paying everything it owes on time. Many do. We publish aggregates and industry patterns for exactly this reason, and we do not name companies as failures.

Companies House does not verify what is filed with it

Every figure on this site originates in a document a company filed about itself. Companies House registers those documents; it does not audit or confirm them. Errors, omissions and misclassifications in the underlying filings flow through to this site, and we have no way to detect most of them.

We have found and documented real examples, including companies entering the year into the employee-count field. Where we know about a class of error, the method page says so.

The reports are produced automatically

The daily report is written by a pipeline, not by a journalist: it reads the tagged figures out of every filing and writes the day's report from them. It has no judgement. It can be wrong in ways a person would catch, and the method page describes two parsing faults found before launch that would each have produced confident wrong numbers.

Editorial responsibility for the site rests with Sam Allcock, who is not an accountant, an insolvency practitioner or a financial adviser.

What we cannot tell you

• Whether any particular company is solvent, sound or at risk.
• What a company's turnover or profit is: fewer than two filings in a hundred tag it.
• Where a business actually trades. A registered office is an address for service.
• Anything about companies that have not filed, or filed outside the days we have read.

Accuracy and corrections

We have read 807,357 filings across 60 publishing days. At that volume there will be errors, both ours and the filers'. If you find one, write to editor@capnews.co.uk with the date and the figure. We check it against the filing and, where we are wrong, correct it and say what changed.

If your own filed accounts are wrong, that correction has to be made with Companies House. It will reach us in a later day's data; we cannot amend the public record.

Licence

Source data is Crown copyright, published under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Cap News is not affiliated with Companies House or any part of government.