Hello Mark, i wanted to ask you, are this two documents also available via API?
- Current Appointments Report
- The Company Record Report
thank you in advance
b.r azhar
It’s not quite clear what you want here. There are indeed endpoints in the API which would appear to be what you want and / or you can get this as “bulk data” covering all the records.
The following sound like what you’d need from the API:
- Do you want appointments (past and present) for a particular officer (which could be a specific human, company or “legal person”)? If so you would want the Officer Appointments. This is generally done either:
a) starting with a given officer in a given company - e.g. you’d look up the officers of a company using:
Companies House Public Data API: Company Officers
…and then parse the “links” → “officer” → “appointments” member to get a link for that officer’s entry in the appointments set:
Companies House Public Data API: Get a company officer appointment
(Note - you can only get the appointment_id that goes there either via this method or the next - it’s not something that’s otherwise available as far as I’m aware).
b) a text search (normally by name) for the officer:
https://developer-specs.company-information.service.gov.uk/companies-house-public-data-api/reference/search/search-officers
- The company profile - covers basic data about an entity. Further specific information can be obtained from there either by following the links in the “links” member of the resource or just querying the appropriate endpoint (e.g. I wouldn’t entirely rely on “what is available is listed in the links”). Documentation on this:
Companies House Public Data API: Company profile
If you needed either in bulk (e.g. all of them that Companies House has) you can get a dump of company data - which isn’t exactly the same set / format of information you’d get from the API - at:
http://download.companieshouse.gov.uk/en_output.html
To get something for appointments apply by posting to the following thread:
Hope this helps.
hello,
thank you for your reply, i wanted to ask are this two documents also available somwhere via API?.
Thank you!
Thanks - I see you’re referring to WebCHeck - see later. I had forgotten about that completely!
I don’t know exactly what is in the two reports (which seem to be available as a “default” for most entities). WebCHeck itself says:
Current Appointments Report:
Current Appointments Report contains general company register information, details of previous names recorded over 20 years, key filing dates, company status details, company officers (excluding business occupation) and recent filing history.
The Company Record Report:
The Company Record is available for all companies that have an outstanding or part-satisfied mortgage charge, and contains general company register information, details of previous names recorded over 20 years, key filing dates, company officers (excluding business occupation), mortgage charge details and recent filing history.
There are no such “reports” available directly via the API. However the API provides all this information - and more as far as I can see - so it’s easy to do this yourself. We actually generate a similar kind of report using the API. We pull in all the relevant data for a company - starting with the Company Profile. We then fill in a template using this. I suppose if you wanted you could even duplicate the reports that are available on WebCHeck this way.
So in your case if you didn’t know the company number already you’d probably start from the Search Company endpoint to get the company number. Say this was 01161446 as in your screenshot, you’d then request https://api.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/01161446 to get the profile resource, parse the links member and request any of those you needed.
WebCHeck
WebCHeck is an earlier tool produced by Companies House. It still works but I think the “modern” equivalent would be the Companies House service website. At the top of the WebCHeck page you’ll see a notice about closure of that service:
In the short term the closure of this service has been deferred.
Further information is available from
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/companies-house-direct-and-webcheck-services-to-close-later-in-2021/
Good luck.
hello,
thank you very much for this very detailed Information. I have one more question, answer to them i did not found in docs. Is it possible to generate PDF Document with template from companies house, by generation the report?
Thank you in advance
best regards
Azhar
In my response I said that I didn’t think this report existed on the new system. I might have been wrong. If you go to the Company Information website, look up a company and go to the “More” tab - as in this example:
…you will see you can get a “company snapshot”. This apparently contains:
The latest 100 entries for:
Filing history
Officers
Persons with significant control
Charges
Insolvency
Registers
I would check that and see if that is what you need. (I can’t check just now as it doesn’t seem to be working but I can see there are other temporary problems with the site.)
As far as I know this isn’t available via the API but you can get it on the web site.
If that isn’t what you need, read on.
You ask how you can get a PDF replicating what you already get from WebCHeck “Company Record Report”. The quick answer is - it’s up to you! If the “Company Snapshot” mentioned above doesn’t help then - as far as I know - the reports (PDF) you said you wanted are not provided in the new API or elsewhere. There is also no direct equivalent for them in the new API. So (again - as far as I’m aware) there’s no existing template on the Companies House sites which duplicates this.
However - as I said - you can almost certainly replicate this yourself. You should be able to get all the relevant data from the API.
To generate a report from the data is then up to you. That’s not something to do with Companies House / the API and it’s not something provided. How you might do that will depend on your requirements.
I believe Companies House use a Perl templating system for the current Company Lookup website. They’ve made the code for the company information website including the page templates (e.g. the Company Profile template) publicly available if that helps you.
We just made our own template. Due to our existing systems we ended up using a mustache template (see also) with javascript / PHP for front-end / server rendering and wkhtmltopdf to produce PDFs. That isn’t public however so we can’t share that.
If you were really stuck I would search - starting on this forum - to see if anyone else has done this and made such a template available. You could also ask Companies House directly. To do that I would make a new post, stating exactly what you need e.g. “I currently use WebCHeck to obtain the Current Appointments Report and the Company Record Report. I download these as PDFs. Since WebCHeck is going to be discontinued soon is there a report / template that duplicates this?”
Note that if you just want company filings e.g. Certificate of Incorporation, Accounts etc. as PDFs you can get them via the API as PDFs or directly from the Company Information web site.
Hope this helps.
Thank you so much, you helped me a lot. I will aks companies house directly about replacement for two documents
best regards
Azhar