Annual Accounts Figures as data

API Question
#1

Does companies house provide the ability to get the annual account filings figures as ‘data’ - I know you they provide a PDF copies of these accounts but could i get, for example, the income figure as a numeric figure without OCR’ing the PDF accounts?

I know Experian provides this info (for a fee) but was curious do they manually parse all filed accounts for this data or does companies house provide this to them (either free or for a value)?

Thanks.

#2

For companies that file their accounts in iXBRL, you can retrieve these (from the filling links) as opposed to the PDF and parse them to extract the figures.

1 Like
#3

Thanks Philip that is very interesting - i’m looking at companies that i’ve seen on experian with the accounts data but for the life of me - can’t see any companies using CH APIs - only ever application/pdf.

Could you point me in the direction of 1 that has the iXBRL format being returned?

For example - this is 1 of the companies that i do know has accounting values within experian but only seeing ‘application/pdf’

curl -U “MY_KEY” -X GET --location “https://frontend-doc-api.company-information.service.gov.uk/document/A7JfaaYtdRlwGN8Ler155twgcfDYgxBsggWIHZncKrw”

(PS - I also noticed that you can download electronic formatted account from CH accounts history page here which would also help me would like to get everything via the REST APIs if possible)

Thanks.

#4

PS: I cannot access any of your links.

Streaming API’s are real-time, so you have to open a socket and listen for any updates as they happen, then filter for the company of interest. There is also a REST endpoint that you can use to query a company (look up the CH development pages).

In these payloads (the REST API or the filing history streaming API which I believe you are interested in) there is / are properties for field(s) of link_documents which you can follow to get the iXBRL files. There is documentation (and discussions on this forum) on how to get these documents via API.

I stand to be corrected here, but I think the CH portal converts iXBRL files (where available) to PDF (though I am sure iXBRL files were available for download through the portal not too long ago!)