A Free Company Structure Checker: Owners, Directors & Filed Accounts in One View

When you're sizing up a business, the first questions are always the same. Who owns it? Who runs it? Is there a parent company behind it? And how current are the accounts on file? The answers are all public at Companies House — but they're spread across separate pages, and the ownership picture in particular takes real digging.

So we built a free tool that pulls it together. Enter any UK company number and you get the profile, the people, the ownership structure, the filed accounts, and any insolvency history — on one page, no sign-up.

What it shows

• Company profile — registered name and number, status (active, dissolved, in administration or liquidation, flagged prominently), company type, incorporation date, registered office and SIC codes with plain-English descriptions.
• Ownership & control — an interactive graph of the company at the centre, its directors, and its Persons with Significant Control (PSCs) — the people or entities that actually control it (25%+ shares or votes, or equivalent influence).
• Corporate parents you can walk up — where a PSC is itself a company, its node is clickable and opens that company's page. Follow an ownership chain one hop at a time, up to the holding company at the top.
• Filed accounts — how recent the latest accounts are (they can be up to ~18 months old), the type filed, and a direct link to each document at Companies House.
• Insolvency — any insolvency cases on record, with dates and appointed practitioners, flagged clearly. Nothing on record? It says so, quietly.

Why it matters for lenders and underwriters

Money moving into a business isn't all trading revenue. A transfer from a parent or sister company can prop up an account in a way that looks like genuine cash generation. To spot that, you first have to know the group exists — and the standard active-directors lookup doesn't surface ownership or parent relationships at all.

The checker closes that gap. PSCs and corporate parents are shown directly, so an intercompany relationship is visible before you start reconciling the statements — not something you have to already know about and add by hand.

It's a control register, not a cap table

One honest limitation: the PSC register records control (the 25% threshold), not the full share register. So this is ownership and influence, not a precise equity breakdown — and we label it that way throughout. Companies House also doesn't publish fines or penalties, so those aren't shown. Overseas parents with no UK registration appear as nodes too, just without a clickable page.

Why we built it

This one is personal. One of ExactSum's co-founders spent years at Funding Circle, where untangling a borrower's company structure by hand was a routine part of every assessment — chasing parent and sister companies, working out who actually controls what, and piecing ownership together across separate Companies House pages. It was slow, manual work done over and over again.

So we built it properly, once. We made the checker free and available to everyone, and we fully integrated the same company-structure data into the affordability assessment — so when you're reviewing a borrower's bank statements, the ownership and group context is already there beside the numbers, not a separate job you have to remember to do.

Where it fits

The company checker is the public, free front door to what ExactSum does behind the login: turn the actual bank statements into clean data and lender-ready analysis — cash flow, affordability, director transfers, and automated decisions. The checker tells you who you're dealing with; the platform tells you whether the numbers add up.