I wondered if there was a way to either;
a) Import a list of companies to follow in bulk
b) Flag a company in our CRM system that would trigger a company to be followed via the api
Any help is greatly appreciated!
Kind Regards,
Charlie
Welcome, sounds like you’re looking for:
a) The Companies House bulk data - specifically the Company Data. That has all live company records. Data includes the company name, company number (the key field) and a subset of the data you can get e.g. via the APIs noted below.
b) You can follow companies via email - a semi-manual process if I recall. More likely if you want to update when there’s a change you’ll want one or more parts of the streaming API. Sounds like you’ll want the Basic Company Information stream. These push updates when they occur - for every company - to you. It’s up to you to pull out the ones you want from the stream and ignore the rest. So your CRM would have to maintain a list of the companies of interest (1) and you would set up a process which keeps a channel open to Companies House and processes the ones on your list.
(1) You’ll need the company numbers - if you don’t have these you can use the main API’s Search Company facility to look these up from e.g. company name.
For reference
All the APIs are listed together here along with some general information (principally terms of use, authorization and rate-limiting):
The “main” API - should you wish to look up information rather than waiting for a change to be streamed or reading the data product - is here:
https://developer-specs.company-information.service.gov.uk/companies-house-public-data-api/reference
I highly recommend:
Starting simple as you can as although the authorization and APIs basically work as described people seem to get very confused. The most common issues are around authorization (the “API key”), especially the idiosyncrasies of the languages / tools people use and how these handle http Basic authorization. Ideally play around with a command line tool like curl while reading the documentation / specs.
Make use of the search feature in this forum as there are some common pitfalls (often misconceptions), inconsistencies, unusual data, the odd part that may not be operational etc. Very many of these issues have been described here and detailed explanations / solutions given.
Good luck.