What is the Document ID?

[sid1987]

Can’t figure out what the Document ID is? there seems to be no unique ID for each document documented on Companies House. Am I missing something here? is the document ID in the url of each document?

grateful for any advice

I have been referring to the Document API here: Document API: Specification summary

[voracityemail]

As always the question is “what are you trying to do / achieve”? e.g. where are you starting from - are you trying to find a particular filing? Are you trying to get all the documents for a particular company? etc.

You don’t really need to worry about document IDs. The API is based on following URIs. You look up the Filing History List for a company. Each entry in this has a links member including a URI to get the “document metadata” for the document. That in turn has a link to the actual file data - see details later on exactly how to do that).

As far as I know the whole design of the API is essentially mirroring the flow of the Companies House search website e.g. the assumption is you’ll start from a given company number (or a search, which will then give you a link to the company profile). You then follow the links in the Company Profile e.g. to the filing history (or just make the appropriate URI for the filing history for the company yourself using the company number). Finally the links to the documents are available from the Filing History list.

See my post e.g. here:

Document API Implementation

Good that you managed to answer your own question e.g. how to download documents for a given company number e.g.: Get the filing history For a given filing in the list, locate the “links” object, “document_metadata” member to get the metadata link Request the metadata link to get the document metadata object. Select your chosen data format (pdf, xml etc.), set the appropriate “Accept” http header, add “/content” on the end of the metadata link and request this to get the actual file. So you’…

Also one here covering similar ground:

How to get document_id?

Hmm…I’ve not experienced this - also what’s written above may be a typo but I think what you need is to specify the type you want in the http headers, not URI parameters. Python request.get seems to use “headers” for http headers and not “params” as written above as per Quickstart — Requests 2.25.1 documentation At least using the http header works for me - and CH say it in the document library documentation. (note “If the Content-Type is unsupported, a 406 error will be generated.”) I think…

Beware that the document metadata is on Companies House servers but the actual document data is hosted elsewhere, so you may need care with authorization as described in the thread posts above.

[sid1987]

Thank you for the detailed explanation, I am basically trying to retrieve the count of employees (“Average number of employees during the period”) and Capital and Reserves. Ideally for a list of Company Numbers that I have, or just for a 1 single Company Number that I have. Appreciate any suggestions on this

[voracityemail]

We do not use this or parse accounts documents so I know little about this. Fortunately it’s possible to search this forum! You can also, but when I did I see some of those questions are maybe answered here. In fact it looks like a thread asking some of these questions (with answers) has come back to life:

Getting Financial Data

Hi, Is it possible to get data such as revenue, expenses etc through the Companies House API. Have gone through the API requests, the filling history seems to be metadata rather than being able to view account history. Please correct me if I’m missing something. Thanks, Paul Link used for API references: Companies House Public Data API: Specification summary (company-information.service.gov.uk)

There were some other enquiries about the individual points you made:

Employees:

Can I get number of employees from API?

If I know the company number is there any way I can pull the number of employees a company has from the API? Thanks

Number of employees

I understand that employee numbers are not included in the API (and why), but am wondering how users are getting this information. Would anyone mind sharing that process please? Thanks

Capital
Probably you will need to look in any accounts filings.
Companies can file a statement of capital but not sure if / when that is required.
Previously this could be reported as an associated filing with the Annual Return but that type of filing has not been made for a number of years. (Example here in one example in my post):

Document description_values for Filings API call

Looking at our notes - admittedly from several years ago - this was a bit of a muddle. I don’t know if the older data is now served in a more consistent way. We did try to cover all the bases to recreate something much like you see in the find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk page though - you might be content to cover the main cases. We did something like (starting with the most common case): Check the description member. This should exist. Try looking it up in the list in th…

Reserves
Again you will probably need to parse the Accounts filings.

You can also find Accounts information in bulk. @ebrian101 has a guide on the bulk data here: Bulk Data products from Companies House | CH Guide

If you are planning to look at the Filing History list to find accounts filings in XBRL documents note that not all accounts are filed electronically / not all will have XBRL documents (some will be just PDFs e.g. pictures).

There is information on how to find out if there is XBRL data available for a filing and if so download that rather than e.g. a PDF in my post on the Document API I think.