Company Status Differences

Information
#1

We currently consume the Companies House API as part pf one of our business processes. On the Companies House search in the advanced search filter, it lists two additional statuses; Open and Closed . Searching for Open companies returns 12,630 results all of which are prefixed with BR and searching for Closed companies returns 6,059 results which are prefixed SE or BR.

Although open and closed are not listed as legitimate statuses in the API documentation even though of the Companies House website it is possible to search for both. It is unclear whether these statuses are the same as active or dissolved but only they seemed to be only assigned to companies that are UK Establishment or European PLC types.

#2

This requires some knowledge of the details of UK company rules / law. You’ve found a couple of “special cases” (there are plenty…)

Although open and closed are not listed as legitimate statuses in the API documentation …

They were listed when I looked in this documentation.

Companies with a “company number” prefixed with “BR” are “UK Establishments of overseas companies”. More information here:

Companies with a “company number” prefixed with “SE” are / were Societas Europaea. The rules around these have now changed following Brexit and they have had to change or close (examples SE000100 - converted to UK Societas, SE000098- closed). More information here:

You will be able to see in the Company Profile Resource that the type member should be set appropriately for these and you can look that up in the “enum constants” to find some text for what they are.

UK establishments (type is uk-establishment) in particular have some unique information in the Company Profile. There will be a branch_company_details member which should have the company number of the foreign company. That will have its own Companies House record with a special member foreign_company_details with more information about the foreign company. A foreign company can have multiple UK establishments.

Examples:
FC004087 - BR001160
SF001035 - BR010414
NF001560 - closed