Company time-line visualization demo

[andrew2]

Just wanted to post how impressed I am with the CH API.

Took a few hours to figure out how to call it correctly, and quite a few more to integrate with Google Street View (api restrictions means a couple of server side helper scripts), but traversing the data is a breeze. There are some limits. For example, not having company numbers in legal entities in the PSC (Persons of Significant Control) means one can’t network ownership trees, but still very good. Would love to have VAT numbers since HMRC API only takes those for their queries.

https://www.myeventflo.com/crisp/compare.aspx

This is a hobby project. Just wanted to see what I could put on a time line. So far: accounts filing, name and address changes, director’s tenure and PSC periods. There is a help page for more info on what it does and how but hoping it is intuitive. Feel free for poke around the code and nab anything of interest. I can’t think of anything else but open to suggestions.

[voracityemail]

Nice! I only looked very briefly and did get a couple of js errors (using latest Firefox, on a Window 10 PC FWIW) but this is a good demo of the kind of thing you can do.

@andrew2

For example, not having company numbers in legal entities in the PSC (Persons of Significant Control) means one can’t network ownership trees

Apologies if you already went through this but see e.g. my posts on this thread:

How to get company family trees?

There are actually a couple of ways in which you may be able to trace the relationships between companies using the API: Foreign or overseas companies (company numbers starting FC… / NF… / SF…) should have an endpoint available listing their UK Establishments (company numbers starting BR…). In turn, the company profile of the UK establishments should reference the “parent” overseas company. Officers and PSCs of companies can be companies / corporate entities themselves. There is an identific…

Do you mean in Legal Persons? If so - yes, you don’t get company numbers but many (all?) aren’t companies anyway. If you mean Corporate PSCs you’re correct insofar as the field is optional and does not seem to be validated (like most CH data). However in our experience many of these were provided (I last looked at this some time ago…).

These should appear - for corporate PSCs - in the identification member. I believe it’s intended to be the registration_number field for this. As mentioned of course you will need to apply some parsing yourself. Sanity checks for e.g. where the company claims to be registered / the registry (people seem to put this in variable fields…) and the registration number are needed. One thing which is common is that people do not include parts of the number e.g. not left padding zeros to give 8 characters.

Of course not all will be registered in the UK either.

I see you’ve worked round that with a little search modal including if the company is extant which is neat.

[andrew2]

Thank you that’s super interesting! I will take another dive into that area. Yes the PSC name search is a compromise but if successful does mean just a few clicks to load a parent. Your outline looks much more comprehensive.
Would very much like to know which company numbers generate JS errors so I can put traps in. They should show up in the left hand side quite prominently (if cryptically) rather than be console in the dev window. I will check more browsers.