Free Company Information June 22, 2019
Free Company Information
We have a sister company called Compelling Media Ltd which runs a network of its own website sites, one of these is interesting because it is a repositiory of UK Company information and offers or will shortly offer free company credit reports based on the annual report and accounts that each company has filed at companies house. The sites name is actually a play on the term report and accounts, and not surprisingly gets a fair amount of traffic just because of that.
The technology they have been developing parses or reads in the pdf’s themselves or the xml files and and in doing so creates a huge database of company information which updates on a daily basis. There is lots of potential for using this data for third party solutions within the recruitment space.
Most services like this are chargeable so its interesting to see a free at the point of use version of these, it is supported by online advertising, which will be dropped from the site in time, and gets its traffic from having a page for every UK company registered at companies. Their model is to present free information as the hook to bring visitors to their site, then to offer more detailed credit reports on a pay as you go basis.
Check out their promotional video:-
There is a still a lot of development to be done under the hood, but there are already 4.9 million pages of company information, the challenge the team has is to get a reasonable proportion of these pages into Google’s index, at the time of writing it has only a few 10,000’s of pages listed so still a long way to go in that respect.
The unique technology the company has developed is the ability to parse into its database the accounts as they are filed at companies house, which means either in PDF format or html, currently only some extracts are in use in their database, but the development team are building that out so all the data in accounts is useable, that is a huge amount of company information data, given that there are around 4.9million UK companies and they file accounts annually, and many have been trading for a long period of time.
Company Information
An example of the data that is currently available can be seen here. Hyelm https://www.reportingaccounts.com/uk/00244598/hyelm/
The current work plan is to add, Directors information, Significant control and greatly improve the site search feature, which whilst working at present, is clunky when compared to the competitors. Detailed company credit reports are being developed and a partnership is under discussion with some of the leaders in this field including Creditsafe and Experian. Being Accountants ourselves we really enjoy working with this company information as it utilises all our skills, being Accounting, Pitch deck creation and Search Marketing.
The next phase of development will also soon be underway and at that point additional data will be including such as Mortgages and charges plus more of the directors reports.
What is attractive about this business niche is that there are millions of queries per day that use the name of companies in their query. This approach is known as the “Long tail” because there are so many queries to attempt to rank for but individually they receive only a trickle of traffic each. However when considered together they represent a huge traffic volume.
Speed is an issue as the intial test version of the site was written using MySql full text searches, to get the site to perform to the right standard and to meet the expectations of users and Google for a highly responsive site it’s queries need to be re-written using Lucene or its derivative Elastic Search. Once these changes are in place the useability of the site will greatly improve and we anticipate that Google will reward it accordingly with a significant increase in trafffic.
Company Information
Here are some interesting sections on their website.
Blog – Like FD Capital they have a blog which regularly gets updated with Finance news and updates from their team.
Pricing – Their pricing page.
About us – About their team members.
Listing Page – this gives an idea of the information available on their listings pages
Once more data is integrated it will become much more of a value added resource, but already we are finding it handy to check out potential clients and it has a useful related companies panel for each listing.
The Reporting Accounts Team
Our CEO Adrian Lawrence is an experienced Accountant and works for FD Capital as well as Reporting Accounts Ltd, he has been qualified for more than 25 years including 12 years within the ecommerce sector as CEO of an ICANN registrar. He is best known within SEO circles for building the successful Article Alley brand in the pre Google Panda days.
Viktorija Mageroska heads our marketing outreach team and is always actively looking for new partner sites to feature our content and excels at keeping our team of copywriters flat out busy.
Carl Wilson and Marko Bijelic make up our in-house development team and are regularly supported by Ronnie, our long term external developer.
Jessica Edwards runs our customer services team.
If you need help from an E-Commerce or SEO specialist FD then make sure to reach out to FD Capital today.
To get an understanding of the areas FD Capital covers please review the following pages to see the disciplines currently on offer:-
- Part Time FD’s – This is our main focus covering the London and West Midlands areas.
- Portfolio FD’s – Part Time FD’s who work for multiple businesses.
- Private Equity FD’s – Finance Directors with experience of working with Private Equity Houses and Venture Capitalists.
- Interim FD’s – Finance Directors needed for short periods.
- Turnaround FD’s – Finance Directors with particular experience of distressed situations and turnarounds.
- E-Commerce FD – Finance Directors with expertise with E-Commerce website and Search marketing.
- Non-Executive FD – Non Executives or NED’s with finance expertise for boards.
Hopefully you can see that we are a niche agency and specialist / boutique finance house offering recruitment but also professional solutions through executive recruitment.