Information for new client

Information
#1

I am a Product Owner in a bank and we are currently looking at ingesting companies house data via the API s publicly exposed. I was wondering if you can help us with how best we can implement the following use cases.
Apologies for the long email.

  1. Initial download/copy of all companies. I see that there is a downloadable data product available. How can I access it via API ? Can I make a API call to get the download of all companies
  2. We would like realtime changes for all companies in CH. Is there a service to which we can attach listeners to and be made aware of changes ?
  3. What would be the frequency of such changes ?
  4. Can I retrieve only the ‘changed/delta’ information (post the initial download) via the API
  5. When new companies are added to CH. is there a way we can get noticed ?

Thanks for your help.
Raji

#2

Welcome. (Note - information below and any errors are my own, I’m not part of Companies House).

Have you seen the Companies House Documentation? Here’s where to start, here are all the API documentation sections.

See also the 3rd party guide by @ebrian101 : https://chguide.co.uk/

  1. Initial download - data is obtained by downloading directly, not via the API. There are several bulk data sets depending on what you want, but it sounds like you will at least want the Companies data. Note that for Companies bulk data the data set is in a different format and you don’t get exactly the fields you do by e.g. calling the analogous part of the API (Company Profile). Also note that the Company data product is only updated monthly.

  2. For realtime updates there is the Streaming API (documentation here). There are several different streams relating to different kinds of updated data - you can consume one or more:

  • Company information
  • Filing history
  • Insolvency cases
  • Charges (Mortgages)

  1. Frequency - you can search this forum, or even see a demo in real time (thanks to @ebrian101 again).

  2. Can you get a delta only relative to initial download? No, that’s up to you to manage.

  3. Alert when new companies are added - this would be via the Company information stream in the Streaming API:

Good luck.